Columnist Praised for “Courageous” Commentary
Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and syndicated columnist, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the board announced Monday afternoon.
The newsoom celebrated, with family and colleagues who knew Tucker and another winner, newsroom manager Hank Klibanoff, at various points in their careers, present. Tucker’s brother came in from Boston, joining their mother and other family members as a surprise.
“It was very celebratory” and “very inspirational,” said Kent Johnson, photo assignment editor, who said champagne toasts were raised.
“There have been things consumed this afternoon that this morning would have gotten half the staff fired,” Tucker’s editorial page colleague, Jim Wooten, told Journal-isms.
Tucker was cited for a submission of 10 columns, including those critical of former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., and former Atlanta mayors Andrew Young and Bill Campbell. Also in the group was one honoring the late Coretta Scott King, whom Tucker praised although she had “fiercely criticized” the King family.
Their titles: “US Leaders, racial epithets better unsaid”; “Reserved but never reticent — She spoke out to honor MLK, fight bigotry”; “Poor little big man’s pity party— No reason to feel sorry for Campbell”; “Voting is a right that has GOP running scared”; “Voting Rights Act protection not outdated”; “Living proof of immigration’s marvelousness”; “Voters can see through McKinney”; “Voter ID law’s ugliness can’t be disguised”; “This is a big deal? Sure shouldn’t be”; and “Stereotypes fester — thanks even to Young.”
The Pulitzer judges said Tucker won “for her courageous, clear-headed columns that evince a strong sense of morality and persuasive knowledge of the community.”
It was the third time in the finalists’ circle for Tucker, 52, but she said “I lost to some extremely distinguished columnists,” Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald in 2004, whose column she runs, and last year Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who had called attention to the genocide in Darfur.
Asked whether the honor might not make her more attractive to a larger paper, Tucker told Journal-isms she had no desire to leave the Journal-Constitution, which “has been great to me for many, many years. It’s difficult being a center-left columnist in a red state, but I have a lot to write,” she said.
Last year, Tucker was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. She said then that she had just finished reading the galleys of “The Race Beat” by Gene Roberts and Klibanoff, now the Atlanta paper’s managing editor for enterprise.
“The Race Beat,” on covering the civil rights movement, won the Pulitzer for history in the book category.
“That book, among other things, gives long-overdue credit to the black press,” Tucker said to the NABJ audience, adding that she was inspired by the story of civil rights activist Daisy Bates. “I, too am standing on the shoulders of giants,” Tucker said.
In the explanatory reporting category, Usha Lee McFarling, a 1989 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists, was a winner along with her Los Angeles Times colleagues Kenneth R. Weiss and Rick Loomis.
They won “for their richly portrayed reports on the world’s distressed oceans, telling the story in print and online, and stirring reaction among readers and officials.”
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The National Association of Hispanic Journalists congratulated NAHJ member Andrea Elliott of the New York Times for her Pulitzer in the feature writing category. Elliott won “for her portrait of an immigrant imam and his life in America,” NAHJ said. “She covers Islam in America as a metropolitan reporter. She created the beat in 2005, focusing on the impact of 9/11 on American Muslims,” the association said. Elliott was born in Washington to a Chilean mother and American father.
Reporter Mei Fong was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the International award for its reporting in China, the Asian American Journalists Association noted.
The Oregonian of Portland won for breaking news reporting for its coverage of the Kim family’s disappearance in the southern Oregon woods and James Kim’s desperate attempt to save them. He was found dead.
The coverage exposed extensive problems with the search, the Oregonian reported. Kim, 35, was a senior editor at CNET, an Internet media company that provides reviews and other services about technology.
The Pulitzer board also awarded a “posthumous special citation to composer John Coltrane for his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.”
In the poetry category, the prize went to “Native Guard” by Natasha Trethewey, who has written about being biracial.
Tucker was among the first wave of African Americans to lead mainstream editorial pages, becoming editor of the Atlanta Constitution pages in 1992. Her column is syndicated to about 80 papers, according to the Universal Press Syndicate.
She has her critics. Campbell was one. In 1999, Jack E. White wrote this in his Time magazine column about Tucker and the then-mayor: “These two brilliant black people have been waging an epic feud since the mayor took office six years ago. Campbell says Tucker suffers from a ‘slave mentality’ that causes her to be ‘more vicious than white journalists.’ She says Campbell is ‘strident,’ ‘vain’ and ‘out of control.'”
Campbell was convicted of three felony counts of tax evasion and is now in prison.
In 2004, former Black Panther Chair Elaine Brown published “The Condemnation of Little B,” in which Brown, now living in Atlanta, used the murder conviction of a 14-year-old Atlanta boy — “Little B” — to lash out at “this new trend of indicting and punishing black children as ‘superpredators.'” Tucker and her Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleagues were singled out.
Asked about that criticism, Tucker replied that while Brown might consider her right-wing, some in Georgia have called her a communist.
In one of her winning entries, Tucker wrote, “For black women of my mother’s generation, Coretta Scott King was like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.“
Tucker went on to say that King “allowed her children – whom I have fiercely criticized – to profit from their father’s legacy.
“And she was not above squeezing every dollar she could out of news organizations or other groups wanting to use passages from her husband’s sermons and speeches. She was blind to the inherent conflict in her logic: If her husband is a public treasure (and he is) whose legacy should be commemorated with a national holiday, then his speeches and sermons should be public property, too.
“Still, she continued to stand for social justice – adopting an expansive vision that many other civil rights activists were unable or unwilling to share.”
Two years before, Tucker said, she wanted to compliment King on her stand against homophobia. “One of her aides – having read my columns criticizing King family antics that had left me unimpressed – couldn’t resist the irony: He suggested I have my picture taken with her, too,” Tucker wrote.
And she provided the photo for readers.
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Angela Dodson Laid Off in Book Review Crunch
Black Issues Book Review has laid off Executive Editor Angela Dodson, delayed paying writers and postponed delivery of its print edition because of a downturn in the economy of the book publishing industry, publisher Ken Smikle told Journal-isms.
Smikle’s Target Market News, Inc., a black-owned Chicago-based research company, bought the largest magazine catering to African American book readers last year. The 50,000-circulation publication, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary, is published every two months.
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It’s “inescapable that it’s not business as usual” in the book industry, “and we’re in a slow crunch period,” Smikle said. As examples, he cited the decision of the Los Angeles Times fold its Sunday Book Review into a combined opinion section that debuted this past Sunday, and Publishers Weekly’s move last fall to deliver the publication free to retailers.
Although African Americans spent $268 million on books in 2005, Smikle said, “the industry is still not spending more in advertising to go after this market.” He said he would not provide figures on the dropoff in advertising at his publication.
Nevertheless, Smikle said, the current 32-page issue, whose contents are posted on the publication’s Web site, is going in the mail and “the writers are going to get paid. We just haven’t gotten paid” by advertisers, Smikle said. “We started going slow” in closing the March-April issue “to pick up additional advertisers.”
Dodson, a veteran journalist and onetime editor at the New York Times, said she had been freelancing for such publications as Heart & Soul, which covers black women’s health and lifestyle issues, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education since she was laid off in late January.
“I have fully enjoyed my time at Black Issues Book Review. I’ve been working with it since the very beginning in one way or another,” Dodson told Journal-isms. “It’s a big gap in my life. I wish them well. I hope they continue to carry on and make it financially.”
Managing Editor Clarence V. Reynolds and Editorial Director Susan McHenry remain, Smikle said. “Everybody’s doing more editing now.” The publication will continue to cover more than 100 black books in every issue, he said.
Black Issues Book Review just announced a partnership with the National Book Club Conference, an African American reading club founded four years ago by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Curtis Bunn to expand its annual three-day gathering, which features leading African American authors.
One group of club members will go to Ghana, Smikle said, while the rest will come Aug. 24-25 to Chicago.
