Old-Fashioned Pickax Journalism

By James Kelly.

During her first month on the job last year, Denver Post Reporter Diana Griego, then 25, was assigned a feature story on a local dentist who implanted coded microdots in the teeth of children whose parents feared they might be kidnaped. "I wondered," Griego recalls, "Is this really necessary?" She knew that some experts claimed that 1.5 million children vanished every year, 50,000 kidnaped by strangers. But when Griego called the FBI and several private groups, she discovered that no one could back up the alarming numbers. After turning in her microdots story, Griego told her editor she wanted to dig deeper.

Over the next several months, Griego and fellow Reporters Lou Kilzer and Norm Udevitz published dozens of articles proving that about 99% of so-called "missing children" were not abducted by strangers. Rather they were runaways (most of whom returned home within 72 hours) or were taken by parents involved in custody battles. The series, edited by Charles Buxton Jr., pointed out that in 1984 the FBI received reports on only 67 children kidnaped by strangers. For Post Editor David Hall, the stories were especially rewarding, since they began with "a rookie reporter looking deeper into a routine story. It was good old-fashioned pick-ax journalism." Hall's peers agreed: the Denver Post series last week won the newspaper world's most coveted honor, the Pulitzer gold medal for public service.

Old-fashioned digging also won a Pulitzer for the Miami Herald's Edna Buchanan, a police reporter for 20 years who can turn a 7-Eleven stickup into a compelling tale of Balzacian detail that illuminates the lives of robber and victim alike. The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader earned its first Pulitzer for a series that revealed payoffs to University of Kentucky basketball players. Jeffrey Marx, who shared the award with Michael York, is only 23 years old.

The Pulitzer board smiled kindly on New York City: the New York Times won two prizes, for a series on Star Wars and the music criticism of Donal Henahan, while one each went to the street-savvy Daily News columns of Jimmy Breslin and the Village Voice cartoons of Jules Feiffer. Knight-Ridder newspapers picked up seven of the 15 newspaper awards, a record for a single chain.

In the arts, for only the third time, the Pulitzer judges picked two books for nonfiction: Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, by Joseph Lelyveld, former Johannesburg bureau chief for the New York Times, and Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, by J. Anthony Lukas (a former Times reporter). Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment) won for his novel Lonesome Dove, a sprawling epic of American frontier life in the 1870s. And for the 13th time in 69 years, the Pulitzer board declined to give a drama award. Though the nominating jury is asked to submit three choices, this year's panel of three selected only one play: a three-hour swatch of Robert Wilson's the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, a 9 1/2-hour multimedia extravaganza that has never been staged in its entirety. Board members rejected the proposal because, in the words of one, "it just seemed impossible to vote for something that none of us could see or read." The jury could not have been too disappointed, since they sent a letter along with their nomination pointing out that some of the best dramatic writing today is in films, notably Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles and Naushad S. Mehta/New York