Mike Pride, who reworked the New Hampshire newspaper The Concord Monitor right into a prizewinning paragon of regional journalism, mentoring generations of reporters and editors, defying the trope in regards to the dying small-town newspaper and exerting an outsize influence on his career, died on April 24 in a hospice in Palm Harbor, Fla. He was 76.
The trigger was myelofibrosis, a uncommon kind of blood most cancers, his son Dr. Yuri Pride mentioned.
As The Monitor’s managing editor from 1978 to 1983 and its editor till he retired in 2008, Mr. Pride gained the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for overseeing The Monitor’s eloquent protection of the demise of a hometown heroine, the astronaut and trainer Christa McAuliffe, within the explosion of the house shuttle Challenger.
And he presided over a newspaper that was considered a mannequin of goal reporting — in distinction to the strident front-page editorials of its fellow New Hampshire paper The Manchester Union Leader — and an unparalleled coaching floor in political reporting for younger journalists each 4 years, when the state, as the primary to carry a presidential major, emerges from relative obscurity to attract a scrum of candidates from each main events and busloads of the nationwide press corps.
In 2008, Preston Gannaway of The Monitor gained the Pulitzer Prize for function pictures for her intimate chronicle of a household dealing with a mother or father’s terminal sickness. Under Mr. Pride’s management, the New England Newspaper & Press Association named The Monitor New England newspaper of the 12 months 19 occasions.
“We see ourselves as a local paper, deeply rooted in this community,” he informed American Journalism Review in 2003. “Even though we’re small, we don’t think that way.”
The newspaper’s day by day gross sales belied its influence. Its circulation of about 22,000 was equal to half the inhabitants of Concord, which, because the state capital, swells with politicians, lobbyists and patronage typically when the Legislature is in session.
During Mr. Pride’s tenure, The Monitor lined the elevation of David Souter, a former New Hampshire lawyer basic, to the United States Supreme Court; the wholesale launch of sufferers from psychological hospitals with out adequate help within the communities to which they had been being discharged; the Roman Catholic diocese’s efforts to guard clergymen accused of sexual abuse; and the appointment of the primary brazenly homosexual Episcopal bishop.
Mr. Pride launched a various rotating number of neighborhood columnists and included an everyday function about jail life, written by an inmate who was serving a life sentence for murdering his ex-wife’s boyfriend. He invited native poets to newsroom lunches to encourage reporters to put in writing extra lyrically. Thanks to the help he earned from the publishers below whom he labored, the newsroom employees grew at one level to 46 from 18.
Like another newsroom, The Monitor’s wasn’t nirvana. Mr. Pride might be gruff and intimidating. And on the morning the Challenger exploded in 1986, he was in courtroom for a lawsuit involving additional time pay wherein The Monitor was unsuccessfully arguing that reporters ought to be handled not as hourly staff however as salaried professionals.
From 2014 to 2017, Mr. Pride served because the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes; he was the primary and solely former Pulitzer juror and board member (he was its co-chairman in 2008) to carry that place. He recruited a extra numerous jury and opened the competitions to on-line and print magazines.
“He taught us the power of words, and how to wield them judiciously, but without fear,” mentioned Jo Becker, who labored at The Monitor and later turned a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times.
“His ambitions for us were certainly beyond our actual abilities back then,” she added. “But that was his gift. He believed in us, and somehow he made us believe that we were capable of meeting the high bar he set.”
Charles Michael Pride was born on July 31, 1946, in Bridgeport, Conn. His father, Charles, held varied jobs, from promoting vehicles to designing cemeteries. His mom, Bernadine (Nordstrom) Pride, was a county clerk and a homemaker. The household moved to Clearwater, Fla., when Mike was 2.
He acquired his first byline at 14 after his cousin Ron Pride, a sports activities editor for The Tampa Tribune, recruited him to cowl a highschool monitor meet. After flunking out of the University of Florida in 1966, Mr. Pride enlisted within the Army, realized Russian on the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., and was deployed to West Germany. There, he intercepted hints that the Soviet Union was about to invade Czechoslovakia — an intelligence coup {that a} skittish senior officer filed away with out forwarding it urgently.
After he was discharged, Mr. Pride was employed as a sports activities reporter at The Tribune. He labored nights, which enabled him to earn a bachelor’s diploma in the course of the day on the University of South Florida in 1972. After commencement, he was employed by The Clearwater Sun, the place he ultimately turned metropolis editor. He later took a job at The Tallahassee Democrat, and he was working as an editor there when he was recruited by The Monitor’s writer.
Mr. Pride wrote lots of of columns for The Monitor and different publications, together with Brill’s Content journal. He wrote, co-wrote or edited eight books, together with a number of in regards to the Civil War and World War II.
In 1970 he married Monique Praet, who survives him. In addition to his son Yuri, he’s additionally survived by two different sons, Sven and Misha; six grandchildren; his brother, Robin; and his sister, Pamela Pride.
Source: www.nytimes.com