Lack of Pulitzers at WSJ Concerns Some Editors

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine writes Monday about the feeling among some at The Wall Street Journal newsroom about the fact that the paper hasn’t won a Pulitzer Prize in three years.

Sherman writes, “In a year when the financial crisis was a major story, Journal editors believed the paper’s strongest chances for a Pulitzer win were not for their business coverage but in the international category, for Iran correspondent Farnaz Fassihi’s coverage of the Tehran uprising last year. Fassihi’s entry didn’t make it into the finalists. (On April 21, Fassihi won an Overseas Press Club award for her reporting.)

“In particular, standards editor Alix Freedman, a Pulitzer winner herself, is said to be upset at Thomson’s rhetoric and has expressed this in private conversations at the paper. Freedman, along with some other senior editors, is said to worry that the anti-Pulitzer dogma could drive ambitious reporters to leave the Journal. Freedman declined to comment. Other Journal staffers believe they are victims of the Pulitzer board’s anti-Murdoch bias. ‘There’s a feeling there was a conservative effort to snub them,’ one insider told me. ‘It’s about the highly publicized war with the New York Times. When you walk into seventh floor of Columbia Journalism School, there’s a big portrait of Sulzberger on the wall. It’s fueling the Journal’s larger paranoia.’

“Under this theory, staffers point to the prize awarded to ProPublica, the nonprofit journalism outfit run by former Journal editor Paul Steiger, as proof the Pulitzer board wanted to stick it to Murdoch’s Journal. ‘ProPublica’s win reminded me of Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. It was like [the Pulitzer board] wanted to send a message to the world that online journalism has come of age,’ one senior reporter said.”

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