Trying to catch the 'second wave'

"Pulitzer's Gold" was published in January 2008, but author Roy J. Harris Jr. has never stopped working for it. The Hingham resident, who was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor for CFO magazine, finds that the news of the day constantly renews the relevance of his book, which recounts the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

His ongoing efforts to promote the book offer insights on the business of publishing and the importance of newspapers as they struggle for survival. The following are excerpts from an interview with The Globe.

In 2002, the thought occurred to me that it would be fun to do something for my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to recognize its history of winning Pulitzer Prizes. My father had worked at the Post-Dispatch for 42 years and had been involved in four of the public-service Pulitzer Prizes, and the thought was that I could do this as a way to commemorate by father. It ended up being a lecture series, and I managed to work it out so that I gave the presentation on what would have been my dad's 100th birthday.

What I found was that very few of the reporters at the Post-Dispatch knew much about this. I mean, they knew there had been these prizes, but they didn't know what the stories were about or who had been involved. A lot had never heard of my dad. That didn't particularly surprise me, but it did surprise me that not even the editors knew, and it dawned on me that nothing had been done to look that genre of public service reporting by newspapers.

The book came out in 2008. It was a very small printing, not much more than 1,000 copies. That sold out and the publisher [University of Missouri Press] immediately went to a system called print on demand. I'm not sure exactly how many have been sold, but it's probably in the area of 2,000 now.

If you go to Amazon.com and look for the key words like "journalism" or "reporting," this book is in the top 30 in all those categories, so that's kind of cool, to know it's still in the mix. I hope that my publisher will go to a second edition, and there's the possibility that it could be done in 2010, but I know that they're under pressure. They had a layoff there and it's my understanding that it's much tougher for them to make a decision on what their finite number of books will be, so they have to do more homework to determine whether it has potential to make money.

Right now, I feel one of my jobs is to get the book out in front of college and high school teachers who might want a good reader for journalism history or investigative reporting. The book came out at $39.95, which is a price point that is difficult for bookstores to keep on the shelves. On Amazon, it's still available for $31, but if we can get a paperback out at $20, I think it's a useable book for schools.

In most cases, a book comes out and there's an initial wave of publicity, then it's gone. But books sometimes can get a "second wave" of readers. In my case, the book came out in January, and in April, the next round of Pulitzer Prizes came out, so I found myself called by people writing about the Pulitzers.

Then these news pegs come along, and some of the chapters become relevant again. All the talk about Ponzi schemes and Bernie Madoff, for example, led to articles about Charles Ponzi, and he's part of a chapter in my book. I initiated an op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times because in my mind, there were two things going on at the time: the Madoff case and the decline of newspapers. I thought that it would be a good thing to remind people of early days of newspapers and how they achieved their role of national public service.

It probably wasn't until 2005-2006 that we began to see a lot of publicity about the declining newspaper....In the introduction, I said it was a sad time for the industry, but the overwhelming feeling from the book is that the level of reporting stays very high through nearly a century. What I think is lost in the whole process of talking about the rise and fall of newspapers, and the lack of a business model, is that reporters are still out there, they have these great ideas, they want to do these great things, and all the prizes do is recognize them.

I was at a recent [Investigative Reporters and Editors] conference, and I expected there to be this kind of pall over the proceedings. But there was no sign of that at all. It reminded me that what this is all about is not newspapers, it's really about reporters and being able to get them the editorial and financial support to do their jobs.

The other panelists will be Boston University journalism professor Elizabeth Mehren and WBUR reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, a member of The Boston Globe team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reports on sexual abuse by priests. The event will be recorded by C-Span Book TV for later broadcast.