Excerpts

Hear Roy Harris read a brief excerpt
What kind of work attains the rarified distinction of Pulitzer Gold Medal winner?

The Poynter Institute Features Pulitzer’s Gold:

Roy Harris regularly contributes to Poynter Institute, the journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. To help familiarize the media community with the power of Pulitzer's Gold, Poynter has published several excerpts from the book as Centerpieces on its www.Poynter.org Website, with introductions by Harris.

The first Centerpiece, titled “'Hard Target' Journalism: Epiphany in Boston,” offered a summary about how the Boston Globe pursued its exclusive on sexual abuse of young parishioners by Catholic priests, and the Church coverup of those crimes. Included with the article is a brief podcast interview that Poynter did with Roy Harris.

With renewed interest in the nature of "Ponzi schemes" lately, Poynter.org excerpted a section of Pulitzer's Gold that recounted the Boston Post's prize-winning exposure of Charles Ponzi in 1920.

Next, in “When Two Pulitzers Were Too Many,” Harris wrote: During my research for Pulitzer's Gold, a look at behind-the-scenes stories of public-service prizewinners over the 91-year history of awards, I found that it hasn't been that long since an unwritten Pulitzer Board rule limited prizes to one a year, or two at most. And one critical internal debate involving multiple prizes, also involving the Post, occurred at a time almost as magical for the paper: the year of its Watergate public-service gold medal, in 1973.

Two great journalists who were deeply involved with the Pulitzer public service tradition—Bob Greene of Newsday and Selwyn Pepper of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—died in 2008. Poynter published Pulitzer's Gold excerpts describing their work.

From the Book

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