Transcript for David Remnick, Carlos Lozada and Nicole Carroll: Behind the Scenes at The Pulitzer Prizes
Episode details can be found here.
Transcript:
Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast, connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I’m your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama, and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.
If you’re someone who watches TV or movies or reads comic books, it’s very likely you’ve heard cultural references to the Pulitzer Prizes.
In a Muppet Show special, pop star Sabrina Carpenter mentions the Pulitzers. The fictional character Lois Lane from Superman is a reporter with at least two Pulitzer Prizes. And the prizes are mentioned in countless TV shows like The Simpsons…
[Clip — The Simpsons, “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”]
Homer Simpson: I smell another Pulitzer!
Nicole Carroll: The Wire…
[Clip — The Wire, “-30-”]
Voice: Maybe you win a Pulitzer with this stuff.
Nicole Carroll: And Sex and the City…
[Clip — Sex and the City, “Shortcomings”]
Carrie Bradshaw: No one who went sleeveless ever won a Pulitzer.
Nicole Carroll: A lot of Pulitzer-winning work has been adapted into films like Spotlight, All the President’s Men, The Color Purple, Glengarry Glen Ross, Fences, and my favorite, To Kill a Mockingbird.
[Clip — To Kill a Mockingbird]
Atticus Finch: You just learned a simple trick, Scout. You’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
Nicole Carroll: Since the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, they have come to be associated with excellence in journalism, drama, fiction, history, biography, poetry, and music.
Now, every year, more than 2,500 entries are submitted in the Pulitzer Prize competition. With the help of 100 distinguished judges who serve on juries, and up to 20 Board members, 23 Prizes are awarded each spring.
So on today’s episode, I’m joined by two of my fellow Pulitzer Board members: David Remnick and Carlos Lozada. David is a Pulitzer-winning author and the editor of The New Yorker. Carlos is also an author, and he won his Pulitzer for his work as a book critic at The Washington Post. Now, he’s an opinion columnist at The New York Times.
Nicole Carroll: We’re going to pull the curtain back a bit and give you a sense of the judging process, how we think about excellence in the context of Joseph Pulitzer’s vision for the prizes, and how the history of the prizes really reflects the history of our country. We’ll also get into what winning the Pulitzer meant for each of us.
First Encounters with the Pulitzers
Nicole Carroll: So, David Remnick, thanks for being here today for this conversation.
David Remnick: Thanks for having me, Nicole.
Nicole Carroll: And Carlos Lozada, you ready to go?
Carlos Lozada: Let’s do it.
Nicole Carroll: Excellent. So let’s jump right into it. We all serve on the Pulitzer Board, and we’ll talk a bit about how the board and the juries work. But first, I’d love to go back and hear about your earliest experiences with the Pulitzers. Do you remember the first time you heard about the prizes?
David Remnick: I didn’t exactly grow up in a literary household, but you know, you’d see it on paperback books, or you’d—
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: You’d hear about what it was. But I thought that they gave out the prizes in Sweden.
Nicole Carroll: Oh.
David Remnick: So I think I was mixing it up a little bit.
Nicole Carroll: What about you, Carlos?
Carlos Lozada: Yeah, I was more interested in the Heisman Trophy than the Pulitzer Prize.
David Remnick: Exactly.
Carlos Lozada: But I think the first time I was aware of it in a specific way, as opposed to just kind of knowing it was a thing that existed, was my first semester of college. I was assigned to read Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: And it was 1989, and it had just won the Pulitzer for Fiction the year before. So, it was there, as you say, on the paperback—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” And the book blew me away. I was seventeen. I was encountering sort of capital-L Literature for the first time, and so in my mind, Pulitzer and that level of writing—of literature—became linked in my head.
David Remnick: Yeah, the board got it seriously right that year.
Carlos Lozada: I don’t know what the other finalists were that year.
David Remnick: Well, as a Board member, it’s in my mind, and I’ve probably mentioned it in our deliberations once or twice—that it’s always great to give it to a great author for the right book.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: And sometimes the board blows it for a long time. Like William Faulkner doesn’t get it until late in his career, for, you know, mediocre books. And so it’s a lesson of the quirks of this whole process, and to take it with a bit of a grain of salt, even though we take it very, very seriously in the room.
Nicole Carroll: That’s a good point.
Carlos Lozada: It’s like Oscar season now—
Nicole Carroll: Right.
Carlos Lozada: —and it’s like Paul Newman winning for The Color of Money.
David Remnick: That was a lot better than Ordinary People beating Raging Bull.
Nicole Carroll: So, I’ll tell you, the first time I heard about it in a meaningful way, I had seen a letter that my stepdad was writing to family. He was, “Family’s doing this, so-and-so’s doing this. And Nikki”—as I was then in high school, I was working on the high school yearbook and newspaper—he said, “she’s doing all this journalism, and I swear she’s not gonna stop till she wins a Pulitzer Prize.” And it’s just really—
David Remnick: That’s a nice thing.
Carlos Lozada: Huh.
Nicole Carroll: It was really chilling. Like, I was a 15-year-old reading this going, wow. He really—and then I’m like, what? Tell me about this Pulitzer Prize. It was a pretty cool thing. So I think we can say it all had meaning to us, even if we thought it was in—
David Remnick: For sure.
Nicole Carroll: Sweden. Where’d you think it was?
David Remnick: I thought it—I mixed it up with the Nobel Prize.
Nicole Carroll: Okay.
David Remnick: I still get it off.
Pulitzer Winners Who Inspired Them
Nicole Carroll: So as you were figuring out what you wanted to do as teenagers, in college, in your twenties, who were some of the Pulitzer winners that inspired you? Who were you looking up to?
Carlos Lozada: Oh, the thing is, I wasn’t interested in journalism or in writing until much later in my life. In college, I wanted to be a policy wonk. I studied economics and all the rest. It really wasn’t until I started working at The Washington Post and I moved away from economics and banking and the rest, that I realized I could be inspired directly by Pulitzer-winning colleagues. I mean, The Washington Post—
David Remnick: Sure.
Carlos Lozada: You know, David, Nicole—
David Remnick: I was there for ten years.
Carlos Lozada: Like, you can’t walk around that newsroom without bumping into Pulitzer winners everywhere. So it’s like, oh, look, there’s David Maraniss. There’s Dana Priest, and Henry Allen, and Michel du Cille—and seeing the quality of their work day in and day out, regardless of what they won the prize for, but then also seeing their names on the wall. That was inspiring to me—sort of knowing that I could be in a place that produced such consistent excellence. For me, that was the inspiration—
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
Carlos Lozada: —was not these kind of distant authors, but colleagues who were doing the work day in and day out.
Nicole Carroll: What about you, David?
David Remnick: Well, I had a strange first encounter.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: With the Pulitzer Prize. Out of college, I arrived at The Washington Post as an intern initially. Eventually I got hired. And in my teenage years, The Washington Post was the hot-shit paper—sorry to say, New York Times—but The Washington Post was, you know, Avis to the New York Times’s Hertz. An old analogy, but it was cooler somehow, particularly because of Watergate and—
Carlos Lozada: Bradlee.
David Remnick: Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham’s kind of patrician élan. It was really something. And there were movies, and Woodward and Bernstein, and Redford and Hoffman, and all the rest. However, by the time I got to The Washington Post, it had suffered a disaster. The Pulitzer Prize that year—I forget which category it would’ve been, maybe features or metro reporting—had gone to a very young metro reporter named Janet Cooke, who had written a piece called “Jimmy’s World.” And it was about a very, very young heroin addict at a time when the city was really struggling with drugs and violence and all kinds of terrible things. And it won the Pulitzer, and the paper got called, and there was some discrepancy about her CV—about Janet Cooke’s CV. And Ben Bradlee started asking her, did you go to—I think it was Vassar—did you graduate? It says here you speak French, Portuguese. Well, that’s where she ran into problems, apparently, and it unraveled from there.
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
David Remnick: And it became clear in this conversation that, tragically, she had piped the story, and the Post did the right thing—not only in giving the Pulitzer back, but also in investigating itself. They had their ombudsman, named Bill Green, write a long, long investigative piece about how this had all transpired in the newsroom. So The Washington Post newsroom that I walked into—I felt like Fred Astaire walking into this building—but the atmosphere was funereal. That was my real first practical encounter with the Pulitzer Prize.
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
David Remnick: I think about that quite a bit.
Nicole Carroll: Sure. The Pulitzer that had a personal impact on me, along the same lines, really changed journalism. 1991 is the year I graduated college, and that was the year the Des Moines Register won for the big project on rape, and they named the woman—the woman wanted to be named.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Nicole Carroll: It happened because the editor, Geneva Overholser, had written a column saying that by newsrooms always protecting privacy, it also compounded the stigma. So she was encouraging rape victims, if they felt comfortable, to come out and say their names, and the newspaper would publish it. And a woman actually took them up on it and called and said, I want to tell my story. And it’s fascinating because the piece was written by a woman, it was edited by a woman, and they got into a lot of detail. They really wanted to destigmatize this. The victim wanted to tell her story—and just how powerful that was, and what a sea change that was in journalism. If you remember, it was like, oh, you can never name anyone, even if they want to be named; we have to protect them. And that really created a whole new conversation for us.
David Remnick: Well, it certainly affected our reporting on Me Too—
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
David Remnick: —with Ronan Farrow, who eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, along with The New York Times, wonderful New York Times reporters. I remember very distinctly, Nicole, sitting in an editorial meeting going over Ronan’s first piece about Harvey Weinstein, and there were women, both unnamed and named, in this piece describing what he had done. And I was in the room with Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, who’s now the deputy editor, and we were using the phrase “sexual assault.” And Deirdre said—I’ll never forget it—she said, “This was rape, and we should use the word for what it is.” And there were people on the record. So I have to think that the kind of journalism you were describing—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: —in that year, affected things when Me Too came along, and The Times and The New Yorker and other outlets approached it in a way that was influenced by that period.
Nicole Carroll: Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the great things about the Pulitzers—it influences things either culturally or even how we do our jobs. So I think it’s a wonderful part about the awards.
Winning the Pulitzer
Nicole Carroll: So, talking about awards: Carlos, you were at The Washington Post when you won the Pulitzer in Criticism in 2019, for articles you wrote about a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience. I thought your writing was just so interesting. You drew meaning and connections, and you taught us something, and you brought things to current life. It was so layered and so wonderful.
Carlos Lozada: Thank you so much. I had a very vague idea of what I wanted to do when I became the book critic at The Post. It was the year before Donald Trump won the 2016 election. And I just decided then, like, you know what, all the big battles of the Trump era are going to be litigated through books, and I need to be the guy that does that. Sometimes you want to read something because you know something about it, and you want to play off your knowledge or experience in the subject. Other times—and most of the time—I want to read it for completely the opposite reason. I know nothing about this subject, and I really want to dive in. Then a few years later, I remember Marty Baron, who was the editor, just walked into my office and shut the door and said, “You have won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.” And I was so stunned that all I could think to say was, “Why?” Like, I asked Marty why I had won, and he just started laughing. And then when I heard that your colleague, Jill Lepore, and Manohla Dargis at The Times were the other finalists, I almost just fell over. But it was great. It was a chance to kind of validate this slog that I’d been over for the last three years or so of reading all the sort of Trump-era books. And I believe it was the first time that the Washington Post celebrated a Pulitzer not just with champagne, but with Inca Kola also.
Nicole Carroll: Oh, that’s wonderful. So, David, you won the Pulitzer in General Nonfiction in 1994 for your book, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Take us back to how you learned that you had won and what that felt like.
David Remnick: So, I’d come back from Moscow after—well, the Soviet Union fell, so my work was done—and I—
Carlos Lozada: Good job, by the way.
David Remnick: It didn’t really last very long. But in any event, I had done the reporting for the most part, and I sat in a little tiny room at the Council on Foreign Relations—half the size of this rather small studio—and banged away at this thing and wrote the book.
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
David Remnick: And then in the meantime, I got a job with The New Yorker. I left The Washington Post. I had to live in New York because my parents were quite frankly falling apart in terms of their health. One had Parkinson’s, one had MS—it was really bad, for all kinds of reasons. And I started working at The New Yorker. Tina Brown was the editor. I guess it was my second year there, or the first year—I can’t remember. I’m sitting in my little tiny office and I get a call from Western Union, the telegram people. Like, what is this?
Nicole Carroll: They called you?
David Remnick: Like the 19th century. But instead of receiving a telegram as if it were the 19th century, this woman said, “Hi, I’m from Western Union.” I thought Western Union had gone out of business 50 years before. And she says, “I’m calling you to tell you this news, that you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize.” And I thought it was someone in the next office bullshitting me—that it was a phony phone call. Like, you know, I have Prince Albert in the can, or here are 52 pizzas for delivery. But then she said, “No, I’m not kidding.” And I didn’t know what to do. I just sort of sat there alone in this office. And I called my mother, and I think she thought I was going to get the award in Stockholm. I think she too had this delusion—
Nicole Carroll: Stockholm.
David Remnick: —that it was the Nobel Prize. But I straightened her out pretty quick, and then I just kind of sat with it for a bit. And the nicest thing that happens when this happens is that you hear from your fourth-grade teacher—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: Or your friend that you haven’t heard from. The rest of it is almost meaningless by comparison. It’s just this inner feeling like, okay, maybe this thing that you put out into the world—that, you know, didn’t sell a bazillion copies—wasn’t so terrible.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: So that’s that. And things about obituaries and the ceremony—it was meaningless compared to hearing from my fourth-grade teacher.
Nicole Carroll: Oh, that’s so awesome.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: That’s a really special thing—hearing from everyone you have ever known.
David Remnick: It was great.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah. So in 2018, I was the editor of the Arizona Republic, and we won for explanatory reporting for a project on the border wall that had taken over my entire life for a year, leading this project.
David Remnick: I’ll bet.
Nicole Carroll: Huge, huge group of people involved. And that year, 2018, was also the year that Kendrick Lamar won. Ronan Farrow won. So the announcement comes out, and I send it to my kids and I said, “Hey, did you see the Pulitzer announcement?” And they said, “Yeah, Kendrick Lamar won.” True story. And then I go to the ceremony, and of course Ronan Farrow is there, and Mia Farrow was there—
David Remnick: Farrow was at our table.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah, and Annie Leibovitz was taking pictures, and Kendrick was there. And so—
David Remnick: That doesn’t happen every year.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah. And so I said to them—I got back from the ceremony, and they’re like, what’s the one question they had?
Carlos Lozada: “Did you meet Kendrick Lamar?”
David Remnick: “Did you meet Kendrick Lamar?”
Nicole Carroll: Yeah, exactly. “Did you meet Kendrick Lamar?” And so we—you can go back on the site, and every class has a class photo. And so that is my claim to fame: I’m in the class photo with Kendrick Lamar.
David Remnick: Excellent.
Carlos Lozada: I was a finalist that year and lost, and then I won the following year. And so I missed my chance to meet Kendrick.
David Remnick: Maybe we can arrange it again.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: What were your winning ceremonies like—when you had your award, and when you had yours? What do you remember the ceremony, what that was like?
David Remnick: Yeah, sure. It was a lunch, and you know what I liked about it? There was no fuss about it. You know you’ve won. You go up and you get this thing that looks like a nice high school diploma and a check, and it’s totally unpretentious, and you feel good, and then you move on and you do your work.
Nicole Carroll: What about you, Carlos?
Carlos Lozada: I have very little recollection of it, aside from the fact that I got one extra seat, and so my wife came with me, but my oldest son, who was then like 11 or something—we just brought him.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: And we just put our two chairs together and sat him in the middle.
Nicole Carroll: Oh.
Carlos Lozada: And so he had lunch with us that day. It’s a weird thing because you’ve already known for months that you’ve won this prize, and so it’s a lot less—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: Stressful.
David Remnick: Fraught.
Carlos Lozada: You’re not, like, wondering what’s gonna happen. Like, you know what’s gonna happen.
Nicole Carroll: Right.
David Remnick: I’ll just add two short things. One is, I’ve reached the age where, in the same way that police officers all look like they’re 15 years old, three quarters of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize are the age of my kids. And to see, you know, a group of them—
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: —come from X paper.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: Because they covered this flood or that—
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: And the earnest, terrific work they’ve done. And they’re so excited. It’s thrilling to see that. I hate to say it in an old-guy sort of way. That’s one thing. And last year it was very moving. We had a poet win for—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: —for his essays about Gaza, which he and his family barely got out with their lives intact. This is Mosab Abu Toha. So I just find that occasion extremely moving every time.
Nicole Carroll: It does. I was just looking back at some of the ones that just really moved me. So Danish Siddiqui, he was the two-time photography winner. And he died while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and the Taliban—
David Remnick: Mmm.
Nicole Carroll: —before he could accept his second award.
Carlos Lozada: Oh, wow.
Nicole Carroll: And so his children came to accept—
David Remnick: Jeez.
Nicole Carroll: —the 2022 prize on his behalf. And then there was Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was literally in prison in Russia—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: —when he learned he had won that year. And we actually, we don’t allow speeches usually, but he did.
David Remnick: There was that rare moment, and I thought he handled it well, and he was incredibly eloquent.
Nicole Carroll: Absolutely. And, you know, like, to me, I’m with you, David. It’s how normal it is—and just normal people. You think Pulitzer Prize winners must have something special, and they do, but they’re all just normal people who worked their tails off.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: Who spent their lives and gave up so much to produce the work that was being honored. And I just love seeing their joy.
Joseph Pulitzer and the Origin of the Prizes
Nicole Carroll: I want to go back to the beginning. I want to talk about Joseph Pulitzer, since we’re talking about his prizes. He believed that journalism was a public service. He, like many people in America during the 1860s, was an immigrant from Hungary. And when he came over, he came to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He was a paid mercenary.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Nicole Carroll: He didn’t see a lot of combat, and he was out a couple months later. And so he went to New York, and he was living on park benches and trying to figure things out. He ended up in St. Louis, which at the time had a very big German population, so he felt more comfortable there. He bought a bankrupt paper in St. Louis. And he turned it around with the way he ran it. He wanted more real-life news. He put scandals; he did storytelling. He wanted drama on the front page, and he did it with the commuters in mind. So many people were coming from agricultural cities and towns into the cities to work at that point, and they needed something to read on the ride home. And it did really well. He made a lot of money, and because he made a lot of money, he came to New York and did the same thing. He bought another paper, The New York World, and he did the same. At that time, you all know—and many people remember—he got into a newspaper war with William Randolph Hearst.
David Remnick: He certainly did.
Nicole Carroll: Yes. Who owned the New York Journal, and they both pushed each other, honestly, to be more and more scandalous.
David Remnick: I think there was a color—
Nicole Carroll: Yellow journalism. Yellow journalism.
David Remnick: Yeah. Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: So they were doing bigger headlines and more sensational—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: And so that’s part of the reason he wanted to establish the prizes. He wanted to bring the professionalism and the dignity. And the reason he paired it with some of the books and the arts is he thought they would give journalism more credibility.
David Remnick: Mmm.
Nicole Carroll: At the same time, he left in his will money to Columbia to start a journalism school for the same reason—he wanted to raise the professionalism of the genre. So look at what has come from that. And I know, Carlos, you had some thoughts about Joseph Pulitzer’s beginning in an article about that.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. He got a lot of criticism for both of those things—for starting the journalism school, because journalism’s not like medicine or law. You don’t need a school. You just go out and do it. And also for the prizes. For him, those two things were completely intertwined: launching the journalism school at Columbia and launching the prizes. He actually pitched it to Columbia. Columbia didn’t want it. And then Columbia got new leadership—I think a new president—then they decided that they wanted the Joseph Pulitzer money to start the school.
Nicole Carroll: Right. And he actually put it in his will, that if Columbia didn’t live up to the agreement, he would move it to Harvard.
Carlos Lozada: He could take it.
Nicole Carroll: He could take it.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. He could take it. And so he wrote this article responding to all the critics—critics of the journalism school, and critics of the prizes. And it was great because he’s like, well, some of these criticisms are okay, but really they’re mainly shallow and full of prejudice and ignorance. So here, I’m going to explain all the reasons why teaching journalism and rewarding journalism mattered. And if you look at the original plan of the prizes, what the prizes were given for, you see some things that still endure, like public service. But also: who has come up with the best idea to improve—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: —journalism education this year?
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: Like, that got a prize. Right. Who are the three best students that just graduated from the journalism school? Here’s money so they can go study the plight of the European people. They would go spend a year in Europe. So what was interesting to me is that it wasn’t just—what some people think of it now is, like, oh, it’s just journalists patting each other on the back. The mission of journalism education was always deeply intertwined—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: —with the Pulitzer Prizes. And you see that in Joseph Pulitzer’s will.
The First Pulitzer Prizes
Nicole Carroll: Absolutely. So I’m going to give you guys a quiz. The first prizes were awarded in 1917 for work—
David Remnick: Oh, this is a quiz.
Nicole Carroll: A quiz.
David Remnick: Quiz Carlos.
Nicole Carroll: Let’s think about history here.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: The first prizes were awarded in 1917 for work that had been published in 1916. Only four prizes were given, because they were just ramping up. Two were journalism and two were in books. What were they covering at that time?
David Remnick: 1916—maybe Ireland was kind of hot.
Carlos Lozada: There was a conflict brewing in Europe.
David Remnick: So we got some World War I.
Nicole Carroll: Yes, we do. So one was on the sinking of the Lusitan—
Carlos Lozada: Lusitania! Yes.
Nicole Carroll: Yes, thank you. Sinking of the Lusitania.
David Remnick: I didn’t know we were on Jeopardy today.
Nicole Carroll: Yes.
David Remnick: What is the Lusitania?
Carlos Lozada: What is—yes.
Nicole Carroll: Yes.
Carlos Lozada: Phrase in the form of a question, please.
Nicole Carroll: And then another one was inside the German Empire. But what’s really interesting to me—so of the two books, one was the biography on Julia Ward Howe, who we know for writing “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and her daughters wrote it. So her three daughters wrote a biography of Julia Ward Howe. So how awesome is that, that there were three women winners the very first year of the Pulitzers?
David Remnick: That’s amazing.
Nicole Carroll: I think that’s kind of cool.
Carlos Lozada: Wow.
The Prizes as a History of America
Nicole Carroll: So we started with four prizes. Now we’re at 23. So let’s talk about the expansion of the prizes. The very common saying in journalism—that it’s the first rough draft of history.
David Remnick: Hmm.
Nicole Carroll: And we’ve seen how the journalism that has won the prize over the last century really reflects our American history—from coverage of the Ku Klux Klan…
[Archival news clip]
Newscaster: Last week they handed out the Pulitzer Prizes. The gold medals went not to a great metropolitan newspaper but to two weekly papers in North Carolina. Their editors decided to fight and expose the Ku Klux Klan.
Nicole Carroll: Other prizes have gone to exposing crime among the most powerful people in America.
[Archival news clip — NBC, May 7, 1973: Watergate / Pulitzer Prize]
John Chancellor: The Post deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize today for its stories on the Watergate scandals.
Nicole Carroll: And the prizes have gone to work that shows the American influence abroad, to the end of the Cold War.
[Archival news clip — ABC, April 7, 1992: Collapse of the Soviet Union / Pulitzer Prizes]
Peter Jennings: The 1992 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. Among the winners, a series of photographs from the Moscow Bureau of the Associated Press taken during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
David Remnick: I remember those photographs. I was standing right there.
Nicole Carroll: Oh, were you?
David Remnick: Yes. I think one of them certainly would’ve been the tearing down of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, right outside of KGB headquarters—
Nicole Carroll: Wow.
David Remnick: —as the Soviet Union was being dismantled.
Nicole Carroll: Hmm. Looking at that history through the winners is extraordinary.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: And you were there. So the first prizes were for journalism and books and biography and history. Now we’ve expanded far beyond those categories. We have categories that fall under journalism, drama, letters, and music. And I think the ability for the prizes to adapt and evolve is key to why the prizes have remained—their significance. In his will, Joseph Pulitzer established an advisory board—that’s us!—and gave it the power to suspend or change any subjects. So bit by bit, the board has added categories like illustrated reporting and photography.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Nicole Carroll: In 2020, we added Audio Reporting, and in 2023 we added a Memoir book category.
Carlos Lozada: So you mentioned audio, Nicole, right?
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: We added Audio—
Nicole Carroll: Right.
Carlos Lozada: Five, six years ago. And that was a big moment, right? What’s interesting about the Pulitzers is that they both are a testament to enduring, unshakeable values, but at the same time are trying to always change and adapt to what is happening in the industry and in the world.
David Remnick: I think that was a good move, adding audio.
Carlos Lozada: I think it was a good move, but—I know I’m in a minority view on this—but I think that segregating audio into its silo of, like, here’s audio reporting or audio journalism—
David Remnick: Oh, I see. I see.
Carlos Lozada: It doesn’t reflect the fact that audio is actually pervading every kind of journalism that we do. And by the way, audio is now combining with video, as you all know. So I think there can be great international reporting that’s audio. There can be great national reporting, great criticism—
David Remnick: Yeah. I’m more conservative—
Nicole Carroll: This is a good time, I think, to explain how this works.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. How does this work?
David Remnick: Please explain, Nicole.
How the Judging Works
Nicole Carroll: Yes. So there are juries for each of the book awards or the arts awards, and then each of the journalism awards. And these juries—that are generally five to seven people—narrow down the hundreds of submissions they get into—
Carlos Lozada: They do the real work.
Nicole Carroll: They do. They do so much work. Thank you. Thank you, juries. And they give three finalists in each category. Three books, three pieces of music, three drama, and then three finalists in each journalism category. Those three finalists are what the board gets, and we vote on all categories. If you’re a jury, you just do your category. We do all 23. And we’ve all heard this—it’s the world’s best book club. But how I feel—
Carlos Lozada: That’s how they lure you in.
Nicole Carroll: That’s how they lure you in.
David Remnick: Well, it’s also books that you might not ordinarily read.
Nicole Carroll: Exactly. Exactly.
David Remnick: And even in Carlos’s position, where, as a professional reader—I bet you some things cross your desk that you would not have necessarily looked at that year.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. Every year there’s only maybe two or three books that I’ve already read—that I read just for myself.
David Remnick: Really?
Carlos Lozada: Yeah. And sometimes that’s great, because that means that category became a little lighter for me.
David Remnick: Right.
Carlos Lozada: But also—maybe I wasn’t reading them with the same care and diligence that I would have if I’m thinking, like, should this win a Pulitzer Prize? Maybe I was just interested in this book, and so I read it for myself. And it matters, right?
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: You can have a significant impact on someone’s career, on someone’s whole professional—
David Remnick: For sure.
Carlos Lozada: —artistic, literary trajectory. So you want to put in the time to really do it right.
Nicole Carroll: I feel the same way. I think this could be someone’s life’s work, and I think about everything they did for that piece of work, and they deserve our full attention on every single piece. I feel a big responsibility. It’s a great privilege, but it is a big responsibility. I take it very seriously. So when we get together—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: We’ve done all of our reading. Everybody’s taken notes; everybody’s got a different system. I have a grid—I don’t know about you guys—where I put down everything and how many pages it is, and I put a timeframe that I’m gonna read it. Do you guys do that?
David Remnick: Wow.
Carlos Lozada: Oh my God.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah, ‘cause I really want to map out my reading.
David Remnick: Wow. You are one organized human being.
Nicole Carroll: Well, yeah—it doesn’t always work out that way, but I try. So we all get in the room, we’ve got our notes, and each person introduces that category and sort of kicks us off.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: And we also have committees that are responsible for leading the discussion. We all discuss it, but there may be five, six, seven people on a committee that are really gonna take the lead in the discussion. And then what I think is fascinating is how we go around the table and everybody has something to say, and it’s always spectacular and enlightening. I feel like I’m just sitting there learning.
David Remnick: Yeah. And you should say, the board is quite various, and by design. There’s a historian—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: A poet, or this or that, you know—a fair amount of journalists, obviously.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: But it’s quite various. So that, in an ideal situation, there’s somebody on the board that has at least a measure of expertise—maybe even devotes their career to it—so that they can guide the discussion, and their authority in that conversation can be, you know—
Nicole Carroll: Right.
David Remnick: Very important to the conversation.
Nicole Carroll: And then it gets to one person who’s, like, no, and here’s why—and then the entire discussion changes.
David Remnick: Well, that’s it. Minds get changed.
Nicole Carroll: Yes.
David Remnick: And I remember it happening—I won’t be specific—I was sat next to Carlos at one deliberation, and I went into that conversation absolutely convinced I was going to vote for book X, as opposed to Y, much less C—and I got really turned around.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: And that’s a fairly common thing.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: I like that. I like that a lot. I come armed with my preferences and my insights on a subject. And the beauty is that, as often as not, I get my mind changed. Since I won in Criticism, I feel kind of proprietary about that category. I have very strong views on what should win and what shouldn’t, and what counts as real criticism. And I feel that my job on the board is to bring a few more people over to the losing side of a particular discussion. If I bring Nicole over, or I bring somebody else over to at least supporting that idea, I feel like I’ve done something—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: —in the meeting.
Defining Excellence
Nicole Carroll: So Pulitzer in his will talks about awarding excellence, and we in our deliberations talk about excellence. What does that mean? What do you look for? This work is all so good—what sets a winner or a finalist above the others?
Carlos Lozada: First of all, I would think the criteria shift according to the category that we’re evaluating. If you’re looking at explanatory journalism, investigative journalism versus feature writing—the writing really needs to be superlative. But of course, superlative writing emerges from superlative reporting. In explanatory journalism or investigative journalism, you also want good writing, but that’s not the main thing that I’m seeking in that particular category. So, I think excellence—
Nicole Carroll: What are you seeking?
Carlos Lozada: Excellence.
Nicole Carroll: What are you seeking in those categories?
Carlos Lozada: Excellence is excellent. But it’s defined differently—
Nicole Carroll: Okay.
Carlos Lozada: —across different categories.
David Remnick: Well, investigative reporting—it’s, what did you find out?
Carlos Lozada: Find out.
Nicole Carroll: Find out, yeah.
David Remnick: And how hard was it to find that? And in defiance of what?
Nicole Carroll: And then, what impact did it have?
David Remnick: Sure. Public service is very, very much, I think, in our heads—and sometimes we say it, and sometimes it’s just understood—is, does this potentially, or has it had, an effect on the way we live and do things?
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: Did Me Too reporting affect the way, in particular, men treat women in the workplace and in life? Or, potentially, could it? And so you’re making a judgment about that too in that particular category.
Carlos Lozada: We can agree in sort of broad terms, but the weight we attach to different aspects of excellence—whether it’s the writing, the reporting, how much—did this piece of fiction, do we think, have the ability to actually alter not just our understanding of its subject, but really affect the way literature is done?
David Remnick: Yeah.
Nicole Carroll: Right.
David Remnick: And people.
Carlos Lozada: And that takes time!
David Remnick: And people talk about books in different ways. That’s always very striking to me.
Nicole Carroll: Well, that’s—
David Remnick: It’s interesting.
Nicole Carroll: It so is. And that’s why that diversity of the board—that we have a poet, we have a historian, we have a local-news columnist—
Carlos Lozada: We have a novelist.
Nicole Carroll: We have a novelist. We have the editor of The New Yorker. We have a columnist for The New York Times. We all bring a little different lens to the work, and that’s what makes it, I think, so special. So the other thing that people may not realize is we have the ability to withhold a Prize if it doesn’t get a majority vote—if we can’t agree. That happened in 2012 in the fiction category. And we can also move submissions to different categories. So in 2023, the book His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice—
David Remnick: That’s right.
Nicole Carroll: It won the prize in General Nonfiction, but it had originally been considered for Biography. So at the board, if something feels like it fits a different category better, we have the ability to move it. How do you feel about that?
Carlos Lozada: Hmm.
David Remnick: I feel cautiously okay about it. In other words, my—I do, as you guys have said already, I really respect how much work the juries do. And when it comes to the volume, particularly when it comes to books—imagine you’re in the jury for biography, general nonfiction, fiction. It’s a lot of work. So I respect that. We do it with real seriousness and caution.
Nicole Carroll: True. True. Carlos, you have feelings, I can tell.
Carlos Lozada: Yeah, no, I do. Because it’s precisely what you raise about respecting the work of the jurors in one case, or wanting to honor the best work overall.
David Remnick: Yeah. We really try to make a decision, but sometimes the board is so split, and the arguments for either books or plays or pieces of music or whatever it might be are so compelling, that maybe, once in a given year, we give two awards. But it’s always something that—it’s always an argument.
Carlos Lozada: Something that maybe folks would want to know is that we actually vote.
Nicole Carroll: We do. We vote.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: There’s a vote—and it’s a majority vote that has to win.
Nicole Carroll: While we’re way in the weeds on the Pulitzer—I find this interesting, and maybe our listeners will—one thing that we do differently than other awards and prizes is that we announce the finalists and the winners on the same day.
David Remnick: Hmm.
Nicole Carroll: So you learn that you’re a finalist and you didn’t win on the same day.
David Remnick: Yes.
Nicole Carroll: How do you feel about that?
David Remnick: Good.
Nicole Carroll: You do?
David Remnick: It takes away the game-show aspect.
Nicole Carroll: Hmm.
David Remnick: I don’t want to be like the Golden Globes.
Nicole Carroll: Hmm.
David Remnick: Except the drinking. That looks fun.
Nicole Carroll: Drinking. What about you, Carlos?
Carlos Lozada: The only thing that bothers me about it—and it’s an unfixable issue—is that, you know, sometimes the difference between a winner and a finalist is—I mean, sometimes it’s clear that this work should win. But often it’s really nuanced, and yet the kind of recognition that finalists get is almost non-existent, except within their particular—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: —institution or subfield. The winners get all the glory, and since it’s announced simultaneously, no one really focuses that much on the finalists. And what’s nice about the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards or the rest—
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: —is that you’re sort of honoring all the work for some period of time. And then one of them is elevated as the winner. The thing that I would not want about that is just a very practical thing—I can only imagine how little work would get done in newsrooms and magazines—
David Remnick: Some of that, too.
Carlos Lozada: —when people know that they’re a finalist and can’t think of anything else for, like, a month or more.
David Remnick: Yeah. I was in Moscow.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: And my great rival across the city was Bill Keller. And we were living in such isolation then, and we loved the work. The work was unbelievably interesting. And I worked till nine in the morning, till two in the morning every day, seven days a week. It was fantastic. I miss it. And one fine day in the late spring, while on a trip with Gorbachev to Cuba with Bill Keller, it was announced that Bill Keller won the Pulitzer Prize—and that I had not.
Carlos Lozada: Were you a finalist?
Nicole Carroll: So you were a finalist?
David Remnick: I was not a finalist. I was a finalist next year.
Nicole Carroll: Okay.
Carlos Lozada: Okay.
David Remnick: But I—this was the guy I was battling against.
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: He was a killer reporter. And if I’m any kind of reporter, I learned half of it from just getting my ass kicked by Bill Keller in Moscow. And so no one was there to celebrate with him except me. So I took him out to dinner like three nights in a row in some, you know, these dreary old—
Nicole Carroll: Yeah.
David Remnick: —Havana-type, you know, hotel restaurants. But he deserved every inch of it.
Nicole Carroll: And I would also just say, for anybody out there who is a finalist, it’s a big deal to get to be in the top three—
David Remnick: Sure.
Nicole Carroll: —is really hard. And they should feel very, very good about that.
David Remnick: Absolutely. And we tell each—that’s the last thing we say to each other—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: —before we then take the vote, because we know someone’s going to be disappointed.
Carlos Lozada: And honestly, like, I—I served on journalism juries—
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Carlos Lozada: —for two years before joining the board. And say you have 200 entries. It’s a piece of cake to go from 200 to 25—
David Remnick: That’s right.
Carlos Lozada: It’s hard to go from 25 to 10. From 10 to five is painful, and from five to three is excruciating. And once you’ve made that three, what that means is that those juries feel that any of those—
Nicole Carroll: Yep.
Carlos Lozada: —is worthy of winning a Pulitzer Prize.
David Remnick: That all is true, but let’s also admit the difficult thing that we know, by both being in the business as editors and writers, and as citizens. What’s happening in the journalism world—the diminution of many newspapers—
Nicole Carroll: Mmm.
David Remnick: The closing of many newspapers. Certain magazines are now ghost ships—they kind of exist, but they don’t exist. So what you do see in certain activities, certain areas, is a winnowing. And we do try to make sure, where possible—and we’re honest—that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, et cetera, et cetera, are not winning everything. And that we’re paying attention to the difficulty under which smaller or mid-size papers are operating in the modern world and still doing great work, where their resources are not what they were, where the scale of their newsrooms are not what they were—and to honor that. And we can’t change that destiny in a decisive way, unfortunately. But I think it’s fair to say that we’re mindful of it.
Nicole Carroll: Their work does have to measure up, though. There’s no—
David Remnick: It absolutely does.
Nicole Carroll: There’s no extra points for hardship.
David Remnick: Nobody’s getting a sympathy Pulitzer.
Nicole Carroll: Right. Right.
David Remnick: But you do see, in certain categories, where a certain kind of activity is done less, ‘cause it’s so damn expensive.
Nicole Carroll: Mm-hmm.
David Remnick: I think, when I was in Moscow, the Miami Herald had people not just in Moscow, but all over Latin America for obvious reasons. And in China. And I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Philadelphia Inquirer—same thing. The real world does enter into our boardroom.
The Significance of the Prizes Today
Nicole Carroll: It does. So there’s a quote from Joseph Pulitzer, and it says, “We are a democracy, and there’s only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its state, its national conduct”—
David Remnick: God, please tell us.
Nicole Carroll: “—and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.” So this work does make a difference. Here are some examples: 1953 Public Service went to the Whiteville News Reporter and the Tabor City Tribune, whose editors had waged a campaign against the KKK in their cities, which led to over 100 arrests. In 2011, Public Service went to the LA Times for a story about local corruption—
David Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Nicole Carroll: In Bell, California. That coverage resulted in arrest of officials. So when you think about our country today, and when you think about the journalism, the literature, the drama, and the music that’s happening right now—what is the significance of the Pulitzer Prizes today? What significance do we continue to have?
Carlos Lozada: In that article that I referenced from the early 20th century by Joseph Pulitzer, he called Public Service the supreme end of journalism. And that’s still the most important prize that we give. In other words—and I have some reservations about this—it’s not knowledge for its own sake. And I value knowledge for its own sake, but he says it’s not knowledge for its own sake. That’s not what we’re doing here. It’s for the utility and service that provides the readers, and that provides the nation. So that’s been embedded in the mission from day one. The other thing that I think is sort of worthy about the larger enterprise is the way that Joseph Pulitzer defined what a journalist is. In that same essay, he said: “A journalist is the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state. He notes the passing sail, the little things of interest that dot the horizon in fine weather. He reports the drifting castaway whom the ship can save. He peers through fog and storm to give warning of dangers ahead. He is not thinking of his wages, or of the profits of his owners. He is there to watch over the safety and welfare of the people who trust him.” Trust is a key word there.
David Remnick: Yeah.
Carlos Lozada: Being able to earn the trust—you can do all the reporting you want, but you have to earn the trust of readers, and of the nation, that you’re hoping to inform and affect.
David Remnick: Every profession or trade has its built-in vanities or sins, and probably in journalism ours is self-regard or sanctimony. We celebrate ourselves, we talk about our pivotal role in democracy. But sanctimony is not the worst sin. It can be trespassed all too frequently, but it’s not the worst sin. We live in a society now—in a political atmosphere where truth is up in the air, where the line between what we would call reporting and propaganda has been blurred radically. It’s nothing new, but it’s more than an incremental change, and it’s affected our body politic—who we are, how we are with each other, how we treat each other, our communications, social media, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is a really parlous moment. And so to have a prize that comes along once a year and values the honest discovery of the truth, as best one can and as honestly as one can, seems to me of real value. Yes, it comes along with some self-celebration, and competition, and argument, and disagreement—like the three of us are bound to have at any meeting. But I think the principle of it, which is this searching out of the truth and the telling of it—whether it’s in artistic form or journalistic form—to me has real value, and it’s not to be dismissed so easily.
Nicole Carroll: I think that’s a great way to sum this up. I think I could speak for all of us that we’re honored to do this work, and we’re grateful for the people who submit that work that is so important to our history and to our democracy. So, David Remnick, Carlos Lozada, thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
David Remnick: Thank you, Nicole.
Carlos Lozada: Great to be here.
Nicole Carroll: So that’s it for this season of the podcast. You can find more information about Carlos and David’s Pulitzer-winning work in our show notes.
To find out who the 2026 Pulitzer winners are, go to pulitzer.org.
Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll. Our senior producer is Justine Daum.
Our engineer is Davy Sumner. Mixing by Davy Sumner and Jason Richards.
Special thanks to Alejandra Dechet and Pran Bandi at The New Yorker for sharing your studio with us. Thank you to James Bittel and Anthony J. Mangone at Columbia Journalism Broadcast Technology.
Music licensing by APM and Epidemic Sound.
Editing, promotion, and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment, and Sean Murphy. Marjorie Miller is our executive producer.