THE SCRAPBOOK's colleague Fred Barnes has famously noted that the most depressing four words you can read in a newspaper story are "First in a series." By this measure, American newspaper readers will soon be reaching for their Prozac. Last week, the New York Times won a Pulitzer for its notoriously tedious 15-part series on race. The series was obvious Pulitzer bait, but no matter; it still won. Given the combined prestige of the Times and the Pulitzer, this means a plague of copycats. When they aren't attending professional seminars on the mysterious declining readership of the daily paper, editors are no doubt already hard at work on their 23-part sermons on global warming, 18-part examinations of the juvenile justice system, and 17-part exposes of groundwater contamination that they hope will charm next year's Pulitzer jury.
Meanwhile, New York Times managing editor Bill Keller must have been sleep-deprived from celebrating when the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz called him last week for a story on the prize. Because Keller confessed a trade secret that close readers of the paper have always suspected: It's standard practice at the Times to steer their readers to the proper conclusion.
Keller told Kurtz that in the race series, the paper decided not to have each piece "build up to a fourth or fifth paragraph where the writer stood back, cleared his throat and told you what to think. We trusted readers would draw their own conclusions and maybe disagree." Keller said that normally his reporters give readers "a little editorial elbow in the ribs."
Forget the multi-part tedium next year. Give Kurtz a Pulitzer for extracting this astonishing quotation.