David Halberstam

Pulitzer Prize for Journalism

Instead of going to New York or Washington or something like that, the gilded path -- and I was credentialed -- I went and worked on the smallest daily in Mississippi. It's a year after Brown v. Board of Education. I thought if you are going to do an apprenticeship, do it in the South, that's where the story is. And I worked with great reporters on a very important story, and I learned how to cover it, how to put yourself at risk, what the ethics were. I sat there, and I absorbed. If I had been a young reporter going to New York, I would have been one of 30 guys out of an Ivy League school going to a paper where all the senior reporters didn't have time to talk to you. By being the one guy like me going to Mississippi and then to Nashville, that was a great graduate school! I was working on a paper in Nashville that had more good reporters, more tough-minded people, and I was the only guy who, every night at dinner, when we would go out to dinner, just inhaled everything, made them go through what they'd done each day. It was a great, great graduate school for me.
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