When Brian Gleason this week heard that his old employer, Sun Newspapers of Charlotte Harbor, Florida, had won its first Pulitzer Prize, he was elated. Then he asked his former editor, Jim Gouvellis, what the award was for.
“He said: ‘The prisoner death editorials,’” Gleason recalled. “I said: ‘Jim, I wrote some of those.’”
It turned out that Gleason, who left the paper in August last year, had written three of the eight unsigned pieces recognized by the Pulitzer committee as the finest newspaper editorial writing of last year. The problem: Nobody on the current staff remembered.
“It was not hard for me to remember,” Gleason, now the communications manager for the county, said in an interview.
On Wednesday, after a polite if somewhat awkward exchange between the newspaper and prize administrators at Columbia University, Gleason was officially added as a co-winner in the category. It is apparently only the second time in the 100-year history of the Pulitzers that such a change has been made.
“It was definitely a headache,” Pulitzer administrator Mike Pride said with a laugh.
Gleason, 51, the former editorial page editor, was quick to rule out foul play.
He described his departure from the Sun as amicable. Asked if he believed the oversight could have been intentional, he replied: “Absolutely not.”
“I wasn’t forced out, I didn’t quit in a huff, I didn’t send a nastygram to everybody in the paper,” Gleason said.
He described John Hackworth, the editor of the Sun papers who was initially cited as the sole winner, as “beside himself” over the mistake.
“I’m going to go over to the Sun later,” Gleason said. “I’m hoping that John is there, so I can give him a big hug.”
The prize-winning editorials, which topped entries from two other finalists, the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times, concerned the beating death of an inmate by corrections officers at a state prison in southern Florida. The coverage led to the dismissals or resignations of several officers involved and to a change in the prison’s administration.
Hackworth, reached in the Sun newsroom on Wednesday, said the last few days had been “a roller coaster.”
The founder of the Sun papers, Derek Dunn-Rankin, died over the weekend at 88, missing out on the Pulitzer win.
Then came word of the prize.
“We had the great news Monday, and then a couple hours later discovered the error we made,” Hackworth said. “Everybody was sick about it.”
The co-winners had worked together for about 20 years.
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