By Michael Miner
The Tribune hedged its bets by nominating Kamin twice: for a prize in criticism but also in explanatory journalism. The heart of each entry was the lakefront series. Pulitzer administrator Seymour Topping says that when the Pulitzer juries met in New York in early March, jurors from both criticism and explanatory had the same complaint. “They said, ‘This is a very, very worthy entry, but it doesn’t fit neatly into either category.’ Some of his articles were actually criticisms in the sense of being reviews, and there were other articles that were actually in a sense architectural news stories.” Each camp believed Kamin belonged with some other.
In the clammy grip of human nature, Kamin did a Web search to check out his opponents. He decided he didn’t have a chance. Chuck Philips and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times had done a heavy-duty study of corruption in the entertainment industry. The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman had probed the UN inspection team in Iraq.
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Kamin knew she was right. On Monday he showed up, and Lipinski took him to lunch. They talked about everything but the Pulitzers, left the restaurant at three minutes to two, and were walking up the back stairs of the Tower as the list of winners started to come in over the wire.
“My feeling was that it was a very powerful piece of work, but it didn’t suit the definitions we were wrestling with for explanatory,” says Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer and a jurist in explanatory reporting. “Explanatory is sort of a squishy category, but it felt to us more like criticism or commentary.”
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