Story behind "Pulitzer's Gold"

I love the story behind the story and so have added "Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism," by Roy Harris Jr. to my must-read list. Columbia Tribune has an article about the book, which is scheduled for January 2008 publication.

With compelling stories and photos, "Pulitzer’s Gold" tells how planning, talent, timing, dedicated newsrooms, supportive owners and sometimes luck can create stories that expose racism as well as governmental, environmental and corporate abuses.

Himself a journalist, Harris' idea for the book "began as a 'labor of love' when in 2002 Harris commemorated the 100th anniversary of his father’s birth with the presentation of a program on the Public Service awards at the Saint Louis University School of Law. His father, veteran reporter Roy Harris, who died in 1980, won the prize in 1950 and helped the Post-Dispatch gain three other gold medals between 1937 and 1948. To the author’s amazement, he found editors and reporters were not well-versed in their own newspaper’s legacy. Even the paper’s history booklet, once distributed to reporters, said almost nothing about the staffers who had worked on some of the newspaper’s biggest, award-winning projects."

"The people at the Post-Dispatch didn’t know much about Pulitzer Prize history and didn’t discuss the Public Service award, ... and they are the only ones to win five," said Harris, who as a copyboy in the 1960s occasionally delivered coffee to Joseph Pulitzer Jr.

He added,"I was amazed how little had been written about how these stories came to be.