Opinion | The best Pulitzer Prize leads of 2022

Opinion | The best Pulitzer Prize leads of 2022

Roy Peter Clark outlines his own favorites in each literary category and explains why.

The quick news lead is no more.

That may be a bit much, but I felt that, just for impact, I would start my yearly assessment of Pulitzer Prize leads by writing the shortest lead I could come up with.

I read Pulitzer leads all day long, and I could not locate even one brief one that was deserving of notice and praise.

However, I discovered many lengthy leads. There were a few that were very long, some that were very long, and a few that were very long. One lead was so long that it could have been better off as a lead zone, the opening chapter of a novella, rather than a lead at all.

My young friend John Woodrow Cox of The Washington Post wrote one of the most memorable Pulitzer leads of the year, a lead piece for the Posts coverage of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Written on time, these are the first four paragraphs:

Hundreds of President Trump's followers stormed the U.S. Capitol in what amounted to a coup attempt, hoping to overturn the election he lost, as he declared to a large gathering outside the White House that they should never accept loss. Capitol Police shot and killed one woman in the confusion.

The congressional certification of Joe Biden's electoral victory was abruptly halted due to a violent spectacle unlike any other in modern American history, much of which was sparked by the president's provocative words.

The crowd battered down Capitol doors and windows with poles bearing blue Trump flags, pushing past unprepared police officers. Just before an armed standoff at the House doors, lawmakers were evacuated. According to police, the woman who was shot by a police officer was taken to an ambulance and subsequently passed away. Confederate flags were flown by rioters on the steps outside the building, and tear gas canisters were hurled across the white marble floor of the rotunda.

The would-be saboteurs of a 244-year-old democracy chanted, "USA!"

About the Tampa Bay Times, I would want to give credit to the principal writer and the project that recently brought my hometown newspaper its 14th Pulitzer Prize. I have spent 13 of those prizes living in St. Petersburg. The Poynter Institute, the academic institution that publishes this website, is the owner of The Times.

To put it mildly, we had a stake in the outcome. Moreover, our dog has a keen sense of investigative journalism.

The project, titled Poisoned, was published on Sunday, March 28, 2021. It's one of the finest titles I can think of for a series like this. Eli Murray, Rebecca Woolington, and Corey G. Johnson wrote the special report. They looked into a factory named Gopher Resource for eighteen months. Their story's lead, blurb, or intro is 88 words long, divided among seven condensed paragraphs.

Poisons abound in Florida's only lead smelter.

lead. Lead. sulfur-containing dioxide.

Lead, however, is the most common.

Lead-laden dust has been hanging like a heavy cloud over the facility where workers break open used car batteries to remove the lead and then melt it in a furnace that preheats to about 1,500 degrees. Lead that has melted down is reforged and sold to businesses that produce new automobile batteries and other goods.

The poison has been exposed in high concentrations to hundreds of workers.

And there have been serious repercussions.

The majority of news articles and other nonfiction works begin with the term lead, which is also sometimes spelled lede. Pronounce it LEED. By coincidence, the inquiry at hand is regarding lead poisoning. There's no mistaking that heavy metal, LED.

Poisons abound in Florida's only lead smelter.

The lead sentence's subject and verb are typically placed at the end, but in this instance, it makes sense. Words that come to an end of a phrase or paragraph are prioritized. The strange word "smelter" conjures up images of a hazardous workplace. Abound has a literary sense to it without being overly theatrical. It seems reasonable to include both of those terms in the top seven since the project as a whole is about lead poisoning.

lead. Lead. sulfur-containing dioxide.

This list of poisons functions as a collection of discrete, wordless statements. Every period acts as a dramatic stop sign, decelerating the reader. Because three is employed to represent the entire, I have claimed that it is the biggest number in literature.

Lead-tainted dust has been hanging over the facility like a thick fog as workers break open used car batteries to extract the lead and then melt it in a furnace that reaches temperatures of about 1,500 degrees. Lead that has melted down is reforged and sold to businesses that produce new automobile batteries and other goods.

It is said that one of literature's functions is to make the familiar seem foreign. The purpose of journalism and other public literature is to familiarize the strange and to expose the perilous hidden facts of the outside world. Seldom used in investigative work, the fog and dust metaphor suggests a poisonous environment, which is further supported by images. These verbs—laced, hanged, crack open, extract, melt, and reforged—do the job here. The final 1,500 degrees flames brightly at the conclusion of the text, making it impossible for readers to ignore.

The poison has been exposed in high concentrations to hundreds of workers.

And there have been serious repercussions.

This last sentence is the shortest in the passage, with six words, excluding those verbless statements. Most of the time, writers use the shortest sentence to make their most significant argument. Not everything needs to be revealed at the beginning of a strong lead. As author John McPhee puts it, it might act as a beacon shining down into the narrative, beckoning and luring us to experience what's to follow.

Readers, call it home cooking what you will, but that's my greatest lead of the Pulitzer season.

The Miami Herald, a fantastic Florida newspaper, came in first runner-up with this gripping tale of a falling condo. Sarah Blaskey, who elicits hearing, seeing, and thinking in us, wrote it:

There was a huge boom, boom, to start.

Then there was a loud roar, broken by the sound of concrete breaking. With a creak and a moan, Champlain Towers South held.

A few minutes went by. Five, Six, Seven, Eight. The strange silence was broken abruptly by a massive noise that sounded like an impossible-to-hear explosion as the 12-story concrete structure appeared to melt down from the middle, resembling sand moving quickly through an hourglass.

At first, it was extraordinary and seemed inexplicable.

For their breaking news reporting, The Herald took up the honor.

Natalie Wolchover, an astrophysicist and a talented editor for Quanta Magazine, deserves special recognition. The article about the development of an extraordinarily potent new telescope won the award for Explanatory Journalism. After reading this lengthy opening line, I thought I might see a space movie vessel go by:

You have to first grind a mirror the size of a house in order to gaze back in time to the early days of the cosmos and see the first stars sparkle. Its surface has to be so smooth that there should be no hills or valleys higher than ankle height if the mirror were the size of a continent. The feeble light from the distant galaxies in the sky—light that has long since left its source—can only be collected and focused by a mirror this massive and smooth, which allows the galaxies to appear as they did in the early cosmos. The faintest, furthest galaxies that humans would ever witness were still forming when enigmatic forces banded together in the shadows to create the first

Among the Pulitzer finalists and winners, there is an abundance of outstanding writing. I'm sure there are certain aspects that I have overlooked but that merit consideration and study. I applaud these journalists and all those who work for the public good.

And readers, please forward me any excellent short leads you come across.

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