It’s nice to see the little people win big and it happened today when the Pulitzers were announced and Nigel Jaquiss of Portland, Oregon’s alternative weekly newspaper Willamette Week won the Investigative Reporting prize for 2005, despite being up against reporters from dailies The New York Times and The Des Moines Register.
Some of you may remember the story of how former Oregon governor and Carter-administration Transportation Secretary Neil Goldschmidt — the biggest name in Oregon politics for the past 30 years — fell from grace when his sexual abuse of a teenage girl during the time he served as Portland’s mayor in the 1970s was finally exposed. You may remember how the Northwest’s biggest daily, the Oregonian tip-toed around it and referred in a headline to a married, 35-year-old man having sex with a 14-year-old as an “affair” in their attempt to simultaneously scoop Willamette Week and play nice with Goldschmidt.
You may know that the fallout of the story led to Goldschmidt’s resignation from the board of a shell corporation set up to buy Portland General Electric, a major Enron asset; a deal that was virtually assured while he was involved but which received far more skepticism without his involvement, was exposed as a bad deal for ratepayers, and has since collapsed. This is going to have to twist the knife for the Oregonian, given that they knew about the story months before it broke.
Congrats to Mr. Jacquiss and all his co-workers (full disclosure: my wife was the theater reviewer for WW in the early ’90s). Apparently this is only the fifth time an alternative weekly has won a Pulitzer. Maybe one of these days the big papers can get back to doing some investigative journalism.