Thoughts on the Pulitzer Prize

The New York Times won five Pulitzer prizes, including one for breaking the story on the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

Now that the New York Times has a surplus of prizes, can it finally give up the prize for Walter Duranty's reporting from the Soviet Union?

If the New York Times is going to win the Pulitzer for breaking the story of Spitzer and the call girl, does the National Enquirer have a legitimate gripe about being passed over for breaking the adultery scandal involving former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards?

According to CNN, this is the first year all of the prizes were open to online-only journalists and publications. Of course, none of them won.

(Of course, Wisconsin bloggers can win the MacIver Institute prize worth $500.)

Milwaukee County had a pension scandal?

Bruce Murphy takes a look at Milwaukee County's lawsuit against Mercer:

It is remarkable how little has been written about Milwaukee County’s suit against Mercer Human Resources Consulting. The stakes for county taxpayers are high. The county has hired actuarial experts who have estimated the total cost of the notorious November 2000 pension plan to be $600 million.

The county has also uncovered considerable documentation suggesting the Mercer did a shoddy job when it came to advising on and estimating the costs of the infamous “backdrop” program, which has allowed county employees to collect lump sum payments as high as $600,000 while also getting a monthly pension payment for life. If Mercer is found at fault, the county could win big. (Two years ago it asked for a settlement of at least $100 million.)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories have barely touched on the details in the court filings.

Murphy also discusses Dave Umhoefer winning the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the county buyback program first reported by Bruce Murphy.

The irony of the JS winning for writing about the county pension system, the story it didn’t cover until it was forced to, is remarkable. Even when it finally wins, there’s a dark cloud shading the silver lining.

But it’s still a Pulitzer, for a paper that’s never had one, and whose predecessor paper, the Milwaukee Journal, had last won in 1977. That’s a long dry spell. The victory validates the strategy of Kaiser to recruit nationally for talent. He did, and brought in enterprise and investigative editor Mark Katches, who had overseen two projects that were Pulitzer finalists at the Orange County Register. Katches seems like the real thing, and the JS appears to be giving him the resources needed to do investigations. I hope there are more Pulitzers to come for the paper.

The winning story involved a county buyback program that allowed employees to buy credit toward their pension for previous years of service, even though they had originally waived payments to the pension during those years (for seasonal jobs in their youth, etc.). Horne and McBride note that I wrote first about the county buyback program in 2002. True, but I did nothing about it. JS reporter David Umhoefer learned about the program and did a strong, in-depth story.

The paper hired two actuaries to crunch the numbers on this program, and they estimated a $50 million impact from several hundred employees who got a buyback. Of course, most of the cost actually came for those employees who were thereby vaulted into the elite group that benefited from the backdrop and the 25 percent bonus passed in November 2000 – the pension sweeteners I wrote about that may cost as much as $600 million and led to the ouster of eight elected county officials.

Still, Umhoefer added another discrete tale to the ongoing story of cronyism and greed that has characterized all aspects of the county pension scandal. More particularly, his piece dramatized the impact a daily paper’s beat reporter can have. Umhoefer took over the courthouse beat in 2002, just after the pension scandal hit, at a high-pressure time, when the county and the paper’s coverage of it were in the spotlight. He waded through all the cross-currents, covered the beat with energy and clarity, and brought that knowledge to bear in the buyback story. His Pulitzer winner, in short, was really the culmination of his work as a beat reporter. And yes, it did remind us of the enduring value of newspapers. Whether in print or online, most journalistic scoops are still being delivered by newspapers, and we all benefit from the work they do.

Gracious of Murphy, considering he could've wondered when he gets to throw out the first pitch at Miller park, too.

Follow-up Pulitzer

Jessica McBride had an excellent column yesterday in the Saturday Waukesha Freeman (just 3 small quarters at every corner newspaper box). Jessica looked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Pulitzer Prize win, and wondered if they would be willing to share.

The newspaper’s Dave Umhoefer, who won journalism’s highest prize, is a good person and a good reporter, who exemplifies the best in journalism.

He was one of the first Wisconsin reporters truly skilled at computer-assisted reporting, which is the use of databases in investigative journalism. So, it’s not surprising that Umhoefer won the big award for a project that involved building a database from raw documents.

His story – exposing a faulty Milwaukee County pension buyback scheme – was great enterprise work. In an era of episodic reporting, Milwaukee journalism needs more like it.

But there’s something unfortunate about the newspaper’s failure to utter the words “Bruce Murphy” as it slaps itself on the back. The newspaper got a Pulitzer for a story that stemmed from a far bigger story it ignored and traditional journalism will never honor.

Murphy, now editor of Milwaukee magazine and a former Journal Sentinel reporter himself, broke the original, far more impactful Milwaukee pension scandal on Milwaukeeworld.com, one of the first journalistic blogs here. Ironically, a local public relations executive, Craig Peterson, created the blog to tell stories the traditional media didn’t.

Murphy revealed that Tom Ament and other administrators stood to reap multimillion-dollar pensions. The big scoop sat on the Web for weeks before the newspaper reported it. Murphy’s story – the first in Wisconsin in which a blog set the news agenda – was enormously influential.

It prompted Ament’s resignation, recalls, a tax revolt, the dramatic realignment of Milwaukee County politics through the election of a Republican county executive, and criminal charges.

The buybacks were not directly related to the pension backdrop lump sums. But Murphy ignited the reportorial focus on pensions and government, particularly in Milwaukee County.

Murphy is why the editors sent Umhoefer over to the county beat. I remember how the editors used to frantically run over to their computers to check Murphy’s site every morning, panicking that he was going to break yet another story they didn’t have. Which, inevitably, he did. Now they pretend the buyback story was something that just popped into their heads.

Normally I would have let this go. After all, Bruce Murphy's a big boy and doesn't need a defense in this community. But I couldn't, and probably for the same reason Jessica cited.

What pushed me to write this column, though, was a quote from Journal Sentinel Editor Martin Kaiser. Murphy’s successor at Milwaukeeworld.com, Michael Horne, was the one who singled it out. Kaiser, in the newspaper’s story about the Pulitzer, stated, “No one else is going to do investigations like this except newspaper staffs. That is what makes you relevant. You’ve got to provide news that people can’t get anywhere else.”

The problem is, someone did.

There was another pension scandal?

Michael Horne reminds us of another reporter's work on the Milwaukee County pension scandal for a certain website. That reporter is now editing some magazine while The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wins the Pulitzer Prize for a follow-up story. Such is the nature of the beast.

Update! You want irony? Look at the first comment on this Murphy's Law.