Gobsmacked to empowerment: A timeline of Pulitzer happiness

Are there seven stages of Pulitzer happiness?

Our first stage hit May 5, a Sunday. I was celebrating dual family birthdays, my wife Kathy’s and our 6-year-old grandson, Cooper’s. Adventurous as he’s been since birth, he wanted a “survival” birthday. And so, of course, he got one. Fire-starting, plastic-tipped target shooting, a little (increasingly au courant) cricket-eating.

Then, the phone call came. Tamsin McMahon, Lookout Santa Cruz’s managing editor, called and before I could grab it, left an uncharacteristically breathless voicemail. “Hi, Ken, sorry to call you on Sunday. I have huge news. I’ll send you a text.” Uh, oh, unexpected calls in the news business often mean trouble. 

When I called her back, her voice was still a little higher-strung than usual, this from the steady rock of our newsroom. “We won. We won the Pulitzer. For breaking news.”

“But, I didn’t even know you submitted it,” I replied. 

“I know,” she said. “I was too superstitious to tell you.” 

That’s the phone call that drives this member-only invitation, for our Lookout’s Pulitzer celebration for members. 

The party is this Wednesday at 5 p.m., and we’ll fit as many of you into our new offices across from Bookshop Santa Cruz as we can. Space is filling fast, so please RSVP quickly to save your place.

First stage of happiness: gobsmacked.

It didn’t seem like it could be a prank, but my mind was now whirling as fast as hers. 

Tamsin had gotten a call from Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzers, who told her of the win. Marjorie said the judges had praised the specific coverage that had won the award: our on-the-ground reporting, over several weeks, of the January 2023 storms, meticulously detailed in a moment-by-moment timeline that Tamsin compiled on weekends and evenings.

It’s only the second Pulitzer in Santa Cruz history, some 70 years since the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian won the Public Service Award for “courageous exposure of corruption in public office, which led to the resignation of a district attorney and the conviction of one of his associates.”

I can describe the second stage as reeling. The world had turned upside down and our little startup had been thrust on the national stage overnight. The St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I worked from 1986 to 1997, had won two Pulitzers, one before I got there and one during, though I didn’t have a direct hand in it. I knew what to expect in terms of national spotlight. But the Pioneer Press was already 137 years old by the time it won its first; Lookout is not quite 3½, among the youngest news organizations ever to win.

But I was near Wenatchee, Washington, 2½ hours from the Seattle airport, and the formal announcement would be noon the next day. I told my family, who were equally incredulous, as the bug consumption continued. 

And then it hit me: Despite the family celebration, I was in the wrong place. I needed to get back to our Lookout Santa Cruz office in time to celebrate with our crew of 15. 

On Sunday, all the car rental places around Wenatchee are shut and the few flights out of the local airport had left. 

So I jumped in an Uber, spending $357 for a rain-soaked two-hour ride to the Seattle airport, where I got one of the few open seats on the last flight of the night back home.

I got back to Santa Cruz at about 2 a.m. and made it to the office just before 10, I think.

We assembled in our conference room, where we would tell the team the good news. The Slack message had gone out in the evening before: “Hi. Everyone needs to Zoom in to the news meeting at 10 tomorrow. Even if you have to step out of covering something. Just come for the first 10 minutes, if that’s all you can spare. I have some *very* big (good) news to share,” Tamsin wrote.

That was then that the collective third emotion became apparent: tingling, as several of us described it. A hummingbird feeling, somewhere between elation and incomprehension. Was this really happening, soon and live on the web? We all awaited the official announcement.

The fourth stage started with relief and transitioned quickly to jubilation. That term – “jubilation” – is one we often used in daily newsroom sports departments. It’s the term for that victory photo, the team celebrating the moment of its win. That’s the now-widely shared photo that accompanied much of the coverage of our win. It is an authentic moment of absolute happiness, made even better by all of us experiencing it around one big table all at the same time. That coverage did turn out to be overwhelming, as we did more than a dozen interviews, largely with national news media. That full list is still growing.

Satisfaction is what I’d cite as stage Number 5.  After the sighs of relief, and pure exhilaration, it hit me that we had accomplished what I set out to do when I first noodled Lookout five years ago. We had provided my hometown with a trusted – and now nationally awarded – local news source. 

There is so much striving in any startup, so much racing to get as much right as possible within time constraints. It’s hard to know when you’ve “made it.” A good friend, and a veteran watcher of life and business, had told me at lunch in March, “You know, you’ve arrived. You made it.” I thought he was right, with everything I knew about our numbers and the increasingly anecdotal response to what we do every day. But the Putlizer provided a moment of Zen.

Happiness is best shared, and Number 6 provided the wonderful realization that this prize isn’t just a joyous celebration for our team – though we are all soon enjoying an exuberant team dinner and distributing the $15,000 in prize money equally among our team.  

No, it’s a still-deepening realization that the award celebrates our place, and its resilience, as much as one news organization. In just two weeks, it’s clear that it has built community pride.  One Lookout reader met me at our front door the day after the announcement, and thrust a two-pack of champagne toward me (they joined the collection of now more than a half-dozen, which we’ll consume at the party.) “Congratulations to you and the team,” she said. “And thanks for representing Santa Cruz.”  And now I’ve heard that over and over.  

I’d started and we’d built Lookout to serve this particular community at this tumultuous time. We’ve said, “Support Lookout. Support Santa Cruz,’’ because we thought that was fair, given our mission. And I know in talking to high hundreds, if not thousands, of you over the past three years, how much you appreciate what we were trying to do every day in this time of great change for Santa Cruz, and the wider world.  

Santa Cruz County, we know, is a special place, and our collective ability to make it better, operating on a shared set of facts, is what you look to us to do. When we do it well – and see that validated nationally – it gives us all a greater sense of Santa Cruz excelling. 

Number 7 is simply empowerment. Our model – journalistically and commercially – is working. And it proves that if you build a new, strong local news institution, members, advertisers and readers will support it – the point I made over again in the more than a dozen interviews we did around the honor. 

Further, the number of communities that have lost a trustworthy source of local news continues to grow. The latest tally: In 2023 an average of 2.5 newspapers per week closed, leaving more than 200 counties as “news deserts.” Already, we’ve planned to take Lookout to a second community, whose news coverage has been deserted by chain ownership of a once-proud daily. Lookout Eugene-Springfield is in the works. And, with the Pulitzer boost, we’re looking at a wider network, with Lookout’s third, fourth and fifth sites in planning.  It’s a new Santa Cruz model in the making. 

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