Feb. 14, 2000


Three Are Elected To Pulitzer Prize Board

By Abigail Beshkin

Joann Byrd

Donald E. Graham

Mike Pride

Joann Byrd, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's editorial page; Donald E. Graham, publisher of The Washington Post; and Mike Pride, editor of the Concord (NH)Monitor, have been elected members of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Columbia awards the annual prizes on the board's recommendation. Members serve a maximum of nine years on the 19-member board.

Joann Byrd has been editor of the editorial page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since 1997. She served as ombudsman at The Washington Post and was, for more than a decade, the executive editor of The Herald , a 60,000-circulation daily newspaper in Everett, Washington. Before joining The Herald as city editor and subsequently serving as managing editor, Byrd was a general assignment reporter and assistant city editor of the Spokane Daily Chronicle. Her first reporting job was covering her junior high school for The East Oregonian in Pendleton, Oregon, where she worked until she earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon.

Byrd taught journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was a founder of New Directions for News, a news media think tank at the University of Missouri. She spent the 1989-90 academic year as a fellow at Columbia University's Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

In 1992 she earned a master's degree in philosophy, with an emphasis on ethics, from the University of Washington. Since then she has lectured on journalism ethics around the country and counseled news organizations on how to make ethical decisions on deadline.

A judge of the annual American Society of Newspaper Editors Writing Awards and a member of the Accrediting Committee on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, Byrd served as a juror for the 1988 and 1989 Pulitzer Prizes.

Donald E. Graham became chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company in 1991 and chairman of the board in 1993. Publisher of The Washington Post newspaper since 1979, Graham is a trustee of the Federal City Council in Washington, D.C., president of the District of Columbia College Access Program, and a member of the board of directors of The Summit Fund of Washington.

A 1966 graduate of Harvard College, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson, Graham served as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. Later, he became a patrolman with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, a reporter at The Washington Post newspaper, and held several news and business positions at Newsweek . Graham was elected a director of The Washington Post Company in 1974 and served as president from 1991-1993; he was named executive vice president and general manager of The Washington Post in 1976.

Mike Pride has been editor of the Concord Monitor since 1983. Prior to that, he served as its managing editor. Under his editorship the Monitor has won the New England Newspaper of the Year Award 16 times,as well as numerous national awards for excellence. The paper was cited by Time magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the best papers in the country.

Before joining the Monitor, Pride was city editor of the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat A graduate of the University of South Florida, he served as a Russian linguist in the Army during the late 1960s and began his journalism career as a sports writer at the Tampa Tribune .

Pride won the National Press Foundation's editor of the year award in 1987 for directing the Monitor's coverage of the Challenger disaster and later the Yankee Quill Award for contributions to New England journalism. A former chairman of the Small Newspapers Committee of the American Society of Newspapers Editors, he also served on the Society's writing awards board. He is a contributing editor for Brill's Content, where his column, "Out Here," appears regularly. With a colleague, he recently completed a history of a Civil War infantry regiment from New Hampshire.

The other members of the Pulitzer Prize Board are: Columbia President George Rupp; Tom Goldstein, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (ex-officio); Andrew Barnes, editor, president and chief executive officer of the St. Petersburg Times ; Louis D. Boccardi, president and chief executive officer, The Associated Press; John S. Carroll, editor and senior vice president, The Baltimore Sun; John L. Dotson, Jr., president and publisher, Akron Beacon Journal; Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Publishing Company, Chicago; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University; Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and author; William B. Ketter, chair of the journalism program at Boston University; Rena Pederson, vice president/editorial page editor, the Dallas Morning News; Sandra Mims Rowe, editor, The Oregonian; William Safire, columnist, The New York Times; Edward Seaton, editor in chief,Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury; Paul Steiger, managing editor, The Wall Street Journal; and Seymour Topping, administrator of the Prizes.