Pulitzer

James McGrath Morris sees parallels between Gilded Age media baron Joseph Pulitzer's time and ours, pointing out that when Pulitzer (1847-1911) began to shape "yellow journalism," newspapers were going out of business and readers were bemoaning the end of journalism as they knew it. Pulitzer charged ahead, boasting that the color pages of the New York World emerged from the state-of-the-art printing presses "like rainbow tints in the spray." Indeed, the World seemed like something entirely new in the staid universe of American newspapers, perhaps as revolutionary then as the Internet today and as provocative as the practitioners of advocacy journalism on Fox. Morris' magisterial new biography, "Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power" (Harper: 560 pp., $29.99)

The newspapers and websites were full Monday morning with stories about Sunday's eclipse: finely done accounts with facts, figures, quotations and on-the-scene reporting. Will any win the Pulitzer Prize? Only time will tell. But if so, there is precedent: The 1924 Pulitzer Prize for reporting went to Magner White, a reporter for the San Diego Sun, for his account of a noontime solar eclipse that occurred Sept. 10, 1923. White's account, in the lean, vivid prose of the day, had weird gusts of wind hitting the city, circus animals pacing and roaring, prostitutes falling to their knees and vowing to change their wicked ways, and San Diego residents exchanging "ghastly smiles, pale lilies they are. " The Sun's story was on the stands within minutes of the eclipse becoming total.

Now here's a mad idea: Invite 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists to use their sharp-tongued political satire by illustrating an article on "Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming" for the March issue of Mad magazine. John Ficarra, the editor of Mad, and Sam Viviano, the art director, assembled the team. They told the International Herald Tribune that the artists were all happy to participate. The contributing cartoonists and the years they won the Pulitzer are: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 2002; Steve Breen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1998; Matt Davies, Journal News, 2004; Jack Higgins, Chicago Sun-Times, 1989; Dick Locher, Chicago Tribune, 1983; Jim Morin, Miami Herald, 1996; Mike Peters, Dayton Daily News, 1981; Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader, 2000; Michael Ramirez, Investor's Business Daily, 1994; and Ben Sargent, Austin American-Statesman, 1982.

NEW YORK — The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism awarded here Monday demonstrated the resilience of old media and the ascendance of the new, as the venerable Philadelphia Inquirer won the prestigious public service medal and the 7-year-old Huffington Post took the national reporting prize for its exploration of the challenges that confront wounded U.S. service members. Digital-focused media first leaped into the Pulitzer winner's circle last year when ProPublica won the national reporting prize.

Oscar Hijuelos is writing a companion novel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" and also plans a memoir that will include his encounters with such musicians as Ruben Blades and Lou Reed. The two books were announced jointly Tuesday by Hyperion Books, which will publish the novel ("Beautiful Maria of My Soul") in 2009, and Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) that will release his memoir, "Thoughts Without Cigarettes," in 2010. The son of Cuban immigrants, the 56-year-old Hijuelos became the first Latino to win the fiction Pulitzer when he was cited for "Mambo Kings," which came out in 1990 and tells the story of musicians-brothers Nestor and Cesar Castillo.

Norris Church Mailer, an actress, model, author and painter who enjoyed and endured the ride of her life as the sixth and final wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer, died at her home in Brooklyn on Sunday. She was 61. Her death was announced on the website of the Norman Mailer Society , which said she passed away "after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. " As Norris Mailer wrote in her 2010 memoir, "A Ticket to the Circus," she was a single mother in her mid-20s when she met the then-52-year-old Norman Mailer at a 1975 party in Russellville, Ark. Their attraction was immediate, even if he was breaking up with his fourth wife and seeing the woman who would become his fifth.

Hollywood spits out writers all the time. But it's not often that a writer gets the chance to spit back — and on the world's biggest stage, no less. Yet Jon Robin Baitz has precisely that opportunity in his lyrical new Broadway play "Other Desert Cities," which he hopes can achieve an improbable goal: fulfill the unmet ambition of an ABC series he conceived but was basically fired from four years ago. "On 'Brothers & Sisters,' I tried to write a show about an emerging matriarch and what America was like right now," he says of the politically minded family drama that ran for five seasons, the last four without its creator.

Sitting through a succession of new plays on a recent visit to New York, I was reminded of car trips as a child with my grandmother behind the wheel of her gigantic red Lincoln Continental. Her destination was clear, but her route, like those of the playwrights who were chauffeuring me around Broadway, was a guessing game. This was before the age of GPS, which would have been irrelevant for a fur-draped woman who relied on hunches rather than a map. (I recall one interminable journey to Atlantic City, N.J., that had me anxiously pointing out highway signs indicating we were headed elsewhere while she calmly applied another round of lipstick.)

I think the article written by Ron Harris regarding Watts should be required reading material for every family in the United States. He deserves a Pulitzer! PAT MILES Garden Grove

Publishing company Pulitzer Inc. said it sold its Postnet.com Internet access service to EarthLink Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Earlier in the week, Pulitzer sold its StarNet dial-up Internet access business in Tucson to EarthLink, the No. 2 U.S. Internet service provider. The Postnet.com site will continue to offer free news, sports and entertainment information. Customers who bought Internet service from Postnet.com will be moved to EarthLink. Shares of Pulitzer closed up $1.04 at $48.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, with the Philadelphia Inquirer awarded the Gold Medal for public service for its reporting on pervasive violence in that city's schools. The reporting stirred reforms to improve safety for students and teachers. The local reporting prize went to Sara Ganim and other staff of the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Penn., for that newspaper's reporting on the explosive Penn State sexual abuse scandal. David Wood of the Huffington Post won the national reporting prize for his coverage of the challenges facing wounded American soldiers.

NEW YORK - A deep report on the fear and violence plaguing urban schools brought the Philadelphia Inquirer the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday, while the New York Times won two awards as Columbia University announced the winners of journalism's top prizes. The two victories by the New York Times -- for reporting on east Africa and for exposing tax avoidance by General Electric Co.-- made it the only double winner. It was a year in which the judges bypassed coverage of some of the most catastrophic news events dominating the headlines in 2011, such as the violent conflict in the Mideast and an earthquake , tsunami  and nuclear meltdown in Japan . The Inquirer's win for “Assault on Learning” was a boon for one of America's oldest newspapers, which recently emerged from bankruptcy and a pair of ownership changes.

Jennifer Higdon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2010, says her desire to write classical music as hospitable as a Southern dinner stems from a childhood trauma: seeing performance art in the 1960s. She blames her father, a "hippie before the hippie movement," who took her and her younger brother to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta when they were kids. One "art happening," Higdon says, featured an artist, dressed in black, covered with rubber cement, strapped to a black canvas.

The only woman in a sea of men in suits, Dorothy Townsend can't help but stand out in the official photograph of the Los Angeles Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for coverage of the Watts riots. The picture also inadvertently documents Townsend's other historic role at the newspaper. After insisting on being reassigned from "the women's pages" in early 1964, she became the first female staff writer to cover local news in a city room long populated only by men. Townsend, who wrote for The Times from 1954 to 1986, died March 5 of cancer at her Sherman Oaks home, said her cousin, Louise Hagan.

Reporting from New York -- Anthony Shadid, a journalist who gave voice to those muffled by the turmoil around them — from Iraqi families enveloped in civil war to young Libyans spurred to take up arms against a dictator — died while doing just that: reporting from Syria in defiance of official attempts to limit media coverage of the bloodshed there. Shadid, who died Thursday at 43, was stricken by an apparent asthma attack while preparing to leave Syria with his New York Times colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks.

When a big bank goes bust in Manhattan, forcing a thriving construction site in Mumbai to shut down and the price of recyclable scrap to plummet, entire families in the slums of India go hungry. This is the butterfly effect of the harrowingly interrelated global economy described in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo's first book, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. " This narrative nonfiction work catalogs a period of three years, beginning before the global market crash of 2008, of the Husain family, supported by a teenage trash-buyer named Abdul, and others who scrape together a living in a slum called Annawadi on a half-acre of polluted land beside the gleaming Mumbai international airport.

"A Bright Shining Lie," Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Vietnam War, will come to the screen under the auspices of Jane Fonda Films, Guber-Peters Co. and Warner Bros. Fonda will function in a key production position, as will Peter Guber and Jon Peters, the production team behind best-picture Oscar winner "Rain Man." Warner Bros. will distribute the film, which will mark Fonda's first venture as a producer of a movie in which she does not appear. Author Sheehan won a Pulitzer last month for his telling of the war with a focus on American Lt. Col. John Paul Vann.

Buried in Monday's announcement of the 2010 Pulitzer winners was the news that the board that, in effect, decides these matters had been up to its old tricks with the drama award. In honoring "Next to Normal," Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's musical about a household grappling with a mother's mental illness, the mandarins at Columbia University's journalism school, where the prizes are administrated, ignored the advice of its drama jury in favor of its own sentiments. It's a familiar story, but as chair of this year's jury — which also included Duke University drama professor John Clum, playwright Nilo Cruz, former chief theater critic of Variety David Rooney and Chicago Sun-Times theater and dance critic Hedy Weiss — I can't help being ticked off. Two points, in particular, rankle: the blinkered New York mentality and the failure to appreciate new directions in playwriting.

Sitting through a succession of new plays on a recent visit to New York, I was reminded of car trips as a child with my grandmother behind the wheel of her gigantic red Lincoln Continental. Her destination was clear, but her route, like those of the playwrights who were chauffeuring me around Broadway, was a guessing game. This was before the age of GPS, which would have been irrelevant for a fur-draped woman who relied on hunches rather than a map. (I recall one interminable journey to Atlantic City, N.J., that had me anxiously pointing out highway signs indicating we were headed elsewhere while she calmly applied another round of lipstick.)

Art Rogers, an award-winning former longtime Los Angeles Times photographer best known for his sports coverage, has died. He was 93. Rogers, who suffered a heart attack Dec. 16, died Tuesday in a skilled nursing facility near his home in Morro Bay, Calif., said his grandson, Jerry Rogers. In a more than 40-year career with The Times that began in 1940 and included general assignment and feature photography, Rogers won the National Headliner Award, two Eclipse awards and a Look magazine award, among many others.