Joann Byrd is a long-ago boss of mine. She’s a friend I don’t see often enough. Mostly, she’s an inspiration.
With an impressive journalism career, she’s just added another feather to her much adorned cap.
A former executive editor of The Herald, Byrd, 64, was recently appointed co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. A board member since 1999, she’ll share this year’s chairmanship with Mike Pride, editor of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor.
From her Seattle home, Byrd said Monday she’s pleased to share the helm of the 18-member board with an editor of a small newspaper.
“It’s a good match. My roots are in small papers,” said Byrd, executive editor of The Herald from 1981 to 1992.
She’ll play a role in the Pulitzer awards ceremony at New York’s Columbia University on May 21.
The 21 awards, in journalism, fiction, nonfiction, history, biography, drama, poetry and music, are culled from thousands of entries. Juries nominate entries in each category before the board selects the winners.
“It’s a very thoughtful group,” said Byrd, whose position is unpaid.
When she left here, it was to become ombudsman, an in-house critic, at The Washington Post. The Herald is owned by the Washington Post Co. Before retiring several years ago, she was editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Her latest project took her far from big-city newspapers. It took her home.
Byrd, a native of Pendleton, Ore. – population 16,000 – has just completed a book about a 1903 flash flood in Heppner, Ore., 60 miles from her hometown. Its working title is “The Calamity at Heppner.” More than 200 people died in the disaster.
“One of the things that really grabs me about the Heppner flood, beyond the deaths of all these families, is how the people in eastern Oregon really gathered around,” Byrd said. “Although it can bring me to tears when I’m writing about it, it is not surprising.
“What always seemed to me of value, growing up in Pendleton, people took care of each other. The sense of community was really strong,” she said.
Known for her ethics expertise, Byrd was among three newspaper executives picked by The New York Times to investigate the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003. The 27-year-old reporter was caught fabricating parts of his stories.
On the heels of her work with the world’s most powerful newspaper, Byrd spent most of the last two years in and near her hometown. She gleaned lots of information from the East Oregonian, the Pendleton paper where she got her start back in high school.
“I’m going full circle,” Byrd said. “I really think that’s important, to see the value of small newspapers and communities.”
Byrd is an inspiration professionally and personally.
In 1978, only months after coming to The Herald from Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper, she was severely injured in a car accident. Her neck was broken.
“People at The Herald rallied around,” she said. “They hardly knew me. I had to get well, get my brain back, walk again, talk again,” she said.
In 1988, she was revisited by tragedy when her husband died of an aneurysm. “If I had not had something interesting to do, I would have just curled up in a ball. I didn’t know this at the time, but I did not want to be a victim.
“Instead, I got to be a newspaper editor,” Byrd said. “I’ve had a fabulous career, one lucky break after another. And then to luck into this great project after I retired, I love it.”
Luck? She calls it luck? A stickler for accuracy, Byrd isn’t quite right about that.
It took a lot more than luck.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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