Cornelia B. Grumman '85
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| Photo: Courtesy of
Chicago Tribune |
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Cornelia B. Grumman calls herself "an
accidental editorial writer." But the Pulitzer Prize she received
in 2003 for her work at the Chicago Tribune has a lot more to do
with passion than with chance.
Grumman won newspaper journalism's most prestigious honor by calling
for death-penalty reform in a series of editorials described by
contest judges as "powerful" and "freshly challenging."
A public-policy major at Duke who earned her master's at Harvard
University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Grumman has
found in journalism a fruitful intersection between her academic
interests and her attraction to writing. Since joining the Tribune's
editorial board in 2000, she has focused primarily on social policy,
education, juvenile justice, and the death penalty.
"If you care about social justice or justice issues in general,
it's a really good business to be in,'' she says. "We're sort
of paid to be idealists, to think about how things should be and
compare them to how they really are."
Grumman enrolled at Duke with a far different dream--a career in
hotel and restaurant management. She had even attended cooking
school in Paris to prepare. But professional journalists she met
at Duke through the DeWitt Wallace Center's Visiting Media Fellows
program persuaded her to refashion her ambitions. After graduating,
she became a reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer. Beginning
in 1989, she worked in China as a stringer for The Washington Post,
covering the student democracy movement that unfolded in Tiananmen
Square.
By 1994, Grumman had returned to her home state of Illinois as
a reporter for the Tribune. In the years that followed, she became
increasingly intrigued by death-penalty reform. She witnessed a
double execution as a reporter and closely read the investigative
reports of her Tribune colleagues, who turned up major flaws in
the state's death-penalty system. Ultimately, the governor of Illinois
ordered a moratorium on executions, and thirteen people on death
row were freed after evidence showed that they had been wrongfully
convicted.
"I really wanted to write about this," Grumman says.
Her prize-winning editorials reveal her intense interest in the
issue. She has called on government officials to improve the procedures
for eyewitness identifications, address serious inequities in death-sentence
convictions related to race and geography, narrow the eligibility
for the death penalty, and acknowledge the problems with executing
the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and juvenile offenders.
"With the authority to impose the death penalty comes a responsibility
to get it right," Grumman wrote in an editorial on "The
Future of Capital Punishment." She added, "Now's the
time to get it right. Get it right, or get rid of it."
Reaching the summit of her profession has not affected her writing,
Grumman says, or lessened her desire to help shape readers' views. "Fortunately,
I'm old enough and far along enough in my life and love what I
do enough that I kind of forgot about [the Pulitzer] afterwards.
I'm just the same old person I was before."
--Stephen Martin
Martin '95 is the public-relations manager for the Center for Creative Leadership
in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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