When the Pulitzer Prize Board has its autumn business meeting tomorrow in the World Room in Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall, the members must put transparency at the top of the agenda and restore the annual live announcement and press conference when the prizes are unveiled every spring.
As this column discovered in May, the livestream video of the winners’ announcement is not what it claims to be and the Pulitzer Prize must uphold the highest standards about the truth.
The prizes are always announced on a Monday in May at 3 p.m. This year it was May 4, so being nearby, one of our number wanted to watch in person and went to campus and up to the third floor of Pulitzer Hall and down the corridor to the World Room at the end.
The assumption was that the doors would be locked for the livestream from Marjorie Miller, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, or at least there would be someone there to prevent an interruption of the video broadcast. But at 2:55, there was no one outside the door, so the knob was turned and the door opened, showing that the large room was filled with students hunched over tables beneath the stained glass window of the Statue of Liberty standing between the world’s two hemispheres, which used to be on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building downtown.
During the shock of the absence of Miller, a proctor moved quickly forward, shushing and closing the door. It was a Department of Computer Science machine learning class final exam. How ironic, a test for an artificial intelligence class in place of what should have been a real person. Now watching the countdown to the livestream on a smartphone, an elevator was taken to the Pulitzer office on the seventh floor, but it was locked. The countdown then reached zero at 3 p.m. and the livestream began, but it wasn’t live at all.
Calling the Pulitzer office the next day, it was explained that the Board had met on Thursday and Friday and made their decisions and the video with Miller was produced over the weekend. There hasn’t been an actual live announcement since 2019, the year before COVID.
But the video was labeled as a “livestream,” which means contemporaneous and occurring at 3 p.m. Monday, not as a recording from the weekend.
This is what Miller says at the beginning of the livestream, with the clear implication that it was happening on Monday afternoon: “Good afternoon, welcome to the announcement of the finalists and winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, books, music and drama. This is always a day of celebration in our communities, but perhaps never more so than today, as we face tremendous political and economic pressures.”
Miller and her office were asked to elaborate about the supposed livestream, with calls and emailing. Finally there was an email response on June 2: “Thank you for bringing this to the attention of Marjorie and our office. Although we have pretaped the announcement since 2020 primarily for ease of logistics notwithstanding the original COVID rationale (each cycle, there are at least 69 citations among the 23 categories which are seldom locked down until the weekend before the announcement due to ongoing research and input from the Board) — it may also be edifying to note that the contents of the video announcement are fully embargoed until the conclusion of the stream — we have taken note of your concerns and will be more precise in our nomenclature going forward.”
The video announcements from this year and earlier years are still labeled as livestreams, but it’s not just nomenclature, it’s the appearance that the 3 p.m. announcement is actually happening at 3 p.m. Better to just have an actual livestream announcement done live at 3 and follow with a livestreamed press conference, as was the practice before COVID.
The Pulitzers are all about truth. So should be their announcement.