A few years ago, I busted Joshua Prager — whose work I admire — for claiming he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. It did no good. He still claims the honor on his site: “His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Best American Sports Writing and the Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior special writer for eight years and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times.”
MSNBC reports: NEW YORK — If you’re keeping a list of journalists who have claimed for years to be Pulitzer Prize nominees without the inconvenience of actually being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, add one more name: Charles Gasparino, the pugnacious senior Wall Street correspondent for Fox Business Network.
…Though there are only three nominees, known as nominated finalists, in each Pulitzer category each year, there are more than 2,000 submissions. The winner in beat reporting in 1992 was Gretchen Morgenson, one of Gasparino’s competitors on the Wall Street beat for The New York Times. The two other nominees were Patrick Healy of The Boston Globe for education reporting, and Jack Kelley of USA Today for reporting on terrorism. (Kelley turned out to have made up information in his articles, but that’s a topic for another day.) No Gasparino.
…When asked on Tuesday in which year he was nominated, former boxer Gasparino jabbed back in a one-line email: “I was nominated by the wsj sir.”
But the news organizations don’t choose the Pulitzer nominees, any more than the record studios choose Grammy nominees. By Gasparino’s reckoning, thousands of journalists each year could sell books and earn speaking fees by calling themselves “Pulitzer nominees.”
…Neither Fox nor Gasparino would answer the question: Why include a “submission” in a bio at all if it didn’t make the finals?
…It’s not uncommon for Pulitzer entrants to make false claims to be nominees. If all Pulitzer entrants could be called nominees, any publisher could give all its authors and journalists that honorific by submitting an entry form and a check for $50. (And some publishers do seem to play that game.)
As the Pulitzer board’s online list of frequently asked questions explains politely, the finalists and the nominees are the same three people in each category: “Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. … We discourage someone saying he or she was ‘nominated’ for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us.”
