On Monday, The Baltimore Sun won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
Its series of articles on Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh’s fraudulent children’s book scheme led to the mayor’s resignation and guilty plea to federal charges. Beyond that, they exposed a culture of self-dealing among board members of the University of Maryland Medical System, after which the CEO and three board members resigned, and the board was reconstituted with strict ethics procedures.
This was not the work of the kind of teeming newsroom I joined when I first took a seat at The Sun’s copy desk in 1986, but the accomplishment of the severely pared-down staff of a newspaper that has been undergoing repeated reductions in resources for more than a decade and a half. That makes the staff’s accomplishment the more meaningful, the more remarkable.
My part in this achievement is minor compared to the work of the team of reporters and photographers who accomplished the work, or of the editors who encouraged and oversaw them. But many of the stories passed through my hands for a final look, a final check, before publication. As small a role as mine has been, I take pride that I contributed something toward the paper’s achievement, just as I took pride in having been a copy editor on many of the articles for which Diana Sugg won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. We all do our part.
We are still working to provide readers with verified information about the world around them, information that they can use to make informed decisions. As the business environment of newspapers becomes more precarious, we have to work all the harder to accomplish that. And we do. We’re still here.
John Early McIntyre has been a professional editor for nearly 40 years, more than 31 of them at The Baltimore Sun, where he has headed the copy desk. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John has taught copyediting at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. A charter member of the ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada.
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