Pulitzers: When the Winner Is No One

What's the greater disappointment: Being nominated for your profession's top honor but losing out to a worthy competitor, or getting nominated and losing out to...a shrug?

The latter is what happened to the three finalists in the editorial writing category of this year's Pulitzer Prizes. While a winning entry was selected in the 20 other categories -- and two winners each in poetry and investigative reporting -- editorial writing produced only a "no award."

"It's unusual but not unheard of" for no prize to be awarded, says Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler, explaining that for a winner to be named, a majority of the Pulitzer board's 17 members (minus however many recuse themselves) must reach agreement. Indeed, "no award" has been the outcome 58 times since the prizes were first given, in 1917, although in more than half of those instances -- 33 -- it's been in one of the seven arts categories rather than one of the 14 journalism categories. Interestingly, of the 25 times the award has been withheld in a journalism category, eight, or just under a third, have been in editorial writing.

Still, it's rare enough -- the last time was in 1993 -- that two of the three finalists were taken aback by the outcome.

"I would characterize myself as certainly disappointed, but probably more baffled," says Maureen Downey of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who was nominated for editorials on the criminal sentencing of teenagers for consensual sex acts. "It seems interesting that you have the judges recommending folks, but the board doesn't feel compelled to honor any of their recommendations. I'd think that'd be frustrating for [the jurors]."

Downey adds that her husband, who is also a journalist, assured her that it's better to be one of three finalists in a category with no award than to be a runner-up, but she's not sure. "It's hard to know how to read it. If they looked at all three and said 'It's hard to pick a clear winner,' that's more reassuring than if they looked at all three and said 'None of these meets our measures.'"

Rodger Jones of the Dallas Morning News is less ambivalent. "We would rather have seen somebody win it just to see that the craft of writing editorials for daily newspapers is essentially honored by the Pulitzer board," says Jones, who successfully pushed for a measure mandating roll calls for votes on statewide legislation. "I would've been glad to have finished second or what have you. Our voices are out there trying to better our communities, and it would be nice to see some effort somewhere honored. It's too bad they couldn't come up with a winner."

Ellen Foley, editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, says she wasn't surprised by the no-award ruling, having served as a Pulitzer juror herself. "I'm not disappointed at all," she adds. "The fact that a paper of our size would be in the circle of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News is an extreme honor to us."

But she does have some thoughts on why editorial writing, among all Pulitzer journalism categories, seems so often to get the shaft. For one thing, she says, editorials tend by their nature to be boundary-pushing. The Journal's package, decrying the use of the governor's "Frankenstein veto," including a video component. "I can see where the somewhat edgy entry might have shaken some of the more traditionalists" on the Pulitzer board.

Then there's the nature of the prize itself, which, among other qualities, is supposed to reward "moral purpose" -- morality, of course, being notoriously subjective. "You can see where there might be some differences of opinion here," she notes.