Winning the Pulitzer

Imagine winning a Pulitzer Prize without knowing you entered.

That’s evidently what happened to Bloomberg News, according to an account by Lachlan Cartwright in the newsletter Breaker Media.

Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait got a call from his deputy Reto Gregori to tell him they won for a series by the company’s CityLab team.

It turns out that CityLab editor Kriston Capps entered the package on behalf of reporter Alexandra Lange without going through official channels.

When Pulitzer officials called Capps to inform him he told his managing editor Nicole Flatow who told Bloomberg executive editor of digital Katie Boyce (Rooney) who told Gregori.

It’s amusing to anyone familiar with Bloomberg’s operations because the company is run as a pretty tight ship.

Knowing both John and Reto, it is hard to suppress a grin imagining that call going down.

Topping it off, Cartwright’s reporting said there was speculation CityLab was going to be shuttered and winning the Pulitzer tabled that fate.

CityLab focuses on urban innovation, reporting on cities, communities, and neighborhoods. Bloomberg acquired the group from The Atlantic in 2020.

Lange won the Criticism category for a series that explored how public spaces and urban design shape family life, especially for children. The Pulitzer board praised it as “graceful and genre-expanding.”

Kudos to Lange for the reporting and kudos to Capps for going rogue, a choice that helped bring home the prize and save the day. Here is the link.

h/t to Chris Roush at Talking Business for pointing out.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

BROTHERS K: I follow Fyodor Dostoevsky on Twitter. You would think it would be a niche topic, but in fact he has 212,000 fans. Recently he asked if the group wants to split off a separate feed about the Brothers Karamozov. There appears to be interest!

THE MORBS: You can expect me to increasingly start using the phrase “I got the morbs” thanks to Julia Alexander.

BRANDED CONTENT: The pundit Tom Goodwin reminding us that the current problem with Generative AI is not the models, but the content being used to deliver answers.

BLACKROCK OR BLACKSTONE: Financial newsletter writer Byrne Hobart brings us a reminder that even the biggest companies struggle with their identities.

THE DOLLAR: It’s interesting how most Americans focus on the U.S. stock market as a barometer for wealth and economic sentiment, not the dollar. People in Europe, Latin America and Asia are much more aware and sensitive to currency fluctuations. The stock market is up this year; the dollar is down.

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