Neela Banerjee Gives the Low-down on the Big Prize
ICN’s own Neela Banerjee, who led our award-winning 2015 coverage of Exxon, served as a Pulitzer Prize judge this year in explanatory reporting. Beth Daley, ICN’s director of strategic development, caught up with Banerjee recently to get insights into the judging — and exactly what being a Pulitzer judge means.
Beth: Give us an overview of the judging process.
Neela: I was contacted last fall by the Pulitzer committee inviting me to serve on a jury for the 2017 Pulitzers. It was completely out of the blue. While I felt it was an honor, I was ready to decline because of all the work I normally have to do, until my ICN colleagues convinced me that would be a really dumb idea. I’d be getting the opportunity to read the best of American journalism, which proved enormously moving and inspiring, and it would help make our reporting at ICN better.
In early 2017, I was told that I’d serve on the explanatory journalism jury, which isn’t one of the two categories for which ICN’s work was honored. Each jury was to meet in late February at Columbia University. In the weeks leading up to that three-day gathering, we got access to an online portal that allowed us to read the entries. Each of us was assigned two pages of entries, which came to about 40 entries a person, and each entry had anywhere from one to, say, a dozen articles. Explanatory is one of the larger categories, with about 130 entries all told, and we had seven jurors, some of whom had served before and who represented a wide cross-section of print and online media.
By the time we gathered in NYC, each entry theoretically had been read twice and we could then vote in the Pulitzer portal for our category. The online queue of submissions recalibrates with the voting: Entries with more yes votes move to the top of the queue, and those with more no votes to the bottom. When a submission got four no votes, it was automatically shed from the queue. That meant the pages gradually grew fewer. Over a few days we whittled it down to about 16, then the final six. The top three were the finalists, and the remaining three were alternates for the finalist category, in case one of our finalists got moved to another category by the Pulitzer board, the group of people who meets in early April to make the final decisions on the prizes.
Beth: Is there certain criteria to judge explanatory work you were given, and if so, what was it?
Neela: We weren’t given a set of criteria beforehand, I think the assumption being that we were familiar enough with the forms of journalism to figure it out. That said, when we met as a jury, there were some discussions about whether a submission was more investigative or foreign reporting or commentary than explanatory. Many entries straddled a couple of categories, and they were also cross-submitted to those categories. The chairpersons of the juries met daily to see in part if a worthy entrant should be in another category. And in the end, the Pulitzer board moved the Panama Papers series to our category from international reporting and awarded it the prize, which meant that none of our three finalists ended up the winner.
Beth: What commonalities did you notice about the best entries?
Neela: Despite the subjective nature of a jury process, our top three rose to the top pretty quickly, while we were reading and voting online and before any substantive discussions began. That’s not to say there weren’t other strong contenders, too. But the top three were easily in the top 10 from the outset with near unanimity in approval. That indicates to me that truly exceptional work is often immediately apparent, even in a sea of very, very good journalism.
The best entries were about a range of topics: some new societal trends and others longstanding problems. But in the second category, the submissions showed the issue in a new light, brilliantly written and sometimes with proposed solutions. We cut entries that were excellent but were local stories that, while compelling, were so peculiar to that place they lacked national or global import. So, broad resonance counts.
Writing matters. We uniformly disliked overwritten stories. We didn’t appreciate imprecise terms. But prose that is too slack and conversational didn’t fly either.
We weren’t crazy about series that felt overtly written for us, the jury. We know that media plan packages to win a prize, but there has to be a genuine need for the public to know the information that the entry lays out. And the entry has to make that clear: Why are you telling us this now, at this juncture? We also didn’t like what seemed like a string of stories grouped together and submitted just because they happen to be on one subject and so would make for a good explanatory journalism entry. There has to be a cohesion and narrative drive that shoots through all the stories in a submission.
Which brings me to my next point: Many entries consisted of several stories, from two or three to 12. If there are multiple stories in a submission, they have to be equally strong. That doesn’t mean they have to be the same length or scope. The quality of the reporting, analysis and prose has to be uniform. No weak links.
Beth: How do you personally judge excellence in journalism?
Neela: I want my eyes to be opened, even when it’s on a longstanding issue such as poverty or gun violence. A big revelation is always great, but an accretion of insight and awareness works, too. That comes from stellar reporting. Journalists have to ask beyond the usual questions and engage the criticisms even before the reader makes them. Stories have to be lucidly written. I love evocative, imagistic writing but it’s too easy to overwrite stories of social import. Keep it simple, sharp, clear. That shows me that the author knows the work is about the subject matter and the reader not about his or her own prowess. And no amount of pretty phrases can paper over weak reporting. If I am smarter and moved after I’ve read something, if I think, ‘Damn, I wish I’d written that,’ if I want to share it with many others, then the work, in my book, is excellent.
Beth: Is there anything you wanted to see more of in the entries you judged?
Neela: Not really. We are all still wringing our hands about the fragile state of American journalism and what it means for our future, and that is much deserved. There is lots to worry about. But reading the entries showed me, to my surprise, that there’s a wealth of terrific journalism being done in the U.S. It was an enormous privilege to read so much of it over the month of my jury work. My other takeaway: Assuming that every year yields a pretty similar bonanza, the fact that in 10 years, tiny ICN managed to win one Pulitzer and be a finalist for a second continues to blow my mind.
