The News
The Pulitzers this year revived an old internal disagreement among the guardians of journalism’s top award over reporting on Jeffrey Epstein — and showed how the prize is struggling to keep up with both public sentiment and shifting media consumption.
Earlier this week, we reported that a years-old fight among Pulitzer Prize judges over a major story about the late sex offender had spilled into view, a rare occurrence within a prestigious awards body that generally keeps its deliberations and decisions relatively private. On Monday, the Pulitzer Board awarded a “special citation” for Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown’s 2018 series, Perversion of Justice, the story that raised questions about the federal government’s prosecution of Epstein and effectively reopened the investigation into him.
It was an unusual move: While the Pulitzer board grants citations for broad categories of journalists like those covering wars or to influential journalists posthumously, the organization rarely grants citations for recent nominees who were snubbed.
The Miami Herald had submitted Brown’s work for a Pulitzer Prize when it was initially published. While it was considered for the investigative prize, it did not win an award in 2018 or 2019 due to the strong objection of an editor who convinced other judges that year that the piece, while important, lacked the substantially new information needed to deserve the award, two people familiar with the deliberations that year told Semafor.
In an email to Semafor last week, Joseph Sexton, then a ProPublica editor who had previously run the Metro and Sports sections for The New York Times, called Brown’s work “commendable and consequential,” but added that “most explosive elements of her reporting had been previously published, both in news articles and books.”
“The work’s impact on the public’s appreciation of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the troubling performances by local and federal authorities was considerable, and I raised the possibility that the entry be moved to another category — public service or explanatory, perhaps. Nothing came of it. The Pulitzer board encourages its juries to engage in both robust debate and its own inquiries into the distinctiveness of all entries. It was a seven-person jury, and the majority vote required to advance Brown’s work as a finalist did not happen.”
Brown declined to comment at the time.
The lack of a Pulitzer has been a sore spot for Brown and her Miami Herald allies. The snub by the Pulitzer Board was initially planned to be a plot point in the televised narrative version of the saga currently being developed by Sony Pictures Television and Adam McKay, Semafor has learned.
The renewed interest last year in the Epstein case prompted some around Brown’s reporting to launch a lobbying effort. A few days before the awards were announced, former McClatchy CEO Craig Forman came back to X after a year to openly campaign for Brown’s work to be recognized by the Pulitzer Board.
Two Pulitzer board members who spoke with Semafor said that external lobbying wasn’t a factor in conversations around giving Brown a special citation, nor was the idea that the award was serving as a corrective for not selecting her when her stories were originally published. And while there was some awareness of the discussion around the “snub” in 2019, much of the board and jury has also turned over since Brown’s work was originally nominated in 2018, and the people who reevaluated it felt it has been central to one of the biggest news stories of the year.
Max’s view
Brown’s somewhat unusual Pulitzer citation just a few years after the snub is one of the recent moves the organization has taken in a self-conscious effort to evolve with public opinion and changing media consumption habits.
After decades of giving out the same awards, over the last several years, the Pulitzers introduced multiple new categories aimed at keeping pace with modern journalism. At the height of the narrative podcast boom, the Pulitzers added an award for best audio reporting, though ironically the category has gotten less competitive as podcasting has moved away from deep narrative investigation and into the cheaper, more repeatable chat show model. On Monday, the Pulitzers gave the award to Pablo Torre, a popular investigative sports journalist. Over the last several years, the organization also added an award for visual journalism, reintroduced an award for beat reporting, and this year added another for opinion writing.
While the awards themselves are intended to be based on merit, the board often sees the awards as a way to send messages about the value of different types of work or individuals.
Judges select the top three Pulitzer finalists, but the board ultimately decides the fate of the various stories. It selected The Washington Post’s reporting on the Trump administration’s dramatic overhaul of the federal government, which the jury selected as a finalist just days after an FBI raid on a Post reporter’s home, and moved the Chicago Tribune’s reporting on ICE, another finalist for the public service award, into the local Pulitzer category.
Citations have been an easy and increasingly popular way for the board to send a message to the world about its priorities and views. Once a rarity (the organization took a nine-year gap of awarding any citations between 2010 and 2019, and similar nearly decade-long gaps at other moments), the board has given one citation out almost every subsequent year, and awarded two citations in 2024 for the late writer Greg Tate and the journalists covering the war in Gaza. Brown’s citation was an acknowledgement, one Pulitzer insider told Semafor, that the board wanted to give some recognition to the Epstein reporting, one of the roiling, ongoing narratives that has continued to reverberate in Washington, New York, London, and other power centers.
The board remains a private group, and some board members and judges Semafor reached out to declined to speak about the selection process, saying the awards speak for themselves. But regardless of whether the board sees itself as a political entity, it’s widely seen as embodying the journalism industry’s view of itself.
That’s why, in 2022, President Donald Trump sued the organization for awarding the New York Times and The Washington Post with Pulitzers for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election. In response, the board took an aggressive step, attempting to use the lawsuit to compel Trump to release long sought-after documents that the president has kept under wraps: his medical and financial records.