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	Villanova Magazine - Summer 2003 Edition
Homepage Back Summer 2003 Archives	Villanova Magazine - Summer 2003 Edition
Homepage Back Summer 2003 Archives		The Journey to a Rare Honor By Holly Stratts The Pulitzer Prize, journalism highest honor, is indeed a rare accolade. Diana K. Sugg ’87 A&S is still heady about the experience of winning one. The Pulitzers were announced on April 7 over the wire and the medical reporter for the Baltimore Sun won in the category of beat reporting. She became the first Villanovan to be so honored. A body of work Sugg’s editors selected seven stories from 2002 for her nomination. The topics included “Present at loved one’s last moment,” about family members being present during an unsuccessful shock trauma treatment; “Cruelest mystery: death before life,” a look at the unexplained loss of infants in the last days of seemingly normal pregnancies; “Death, then a search for kindest of words,” doctors telling family members of death; and “Getting to Alzheimer’s roots,” how scientists have turned their attention to the causes of the disease and what might be done to prevent it. “I think they were my best pieces. Those stories were really born in my heart and were ones I just found along the way that became important to me that I kind of nurtured. One of them I started the year before but could not find a family about families being in the emergency room during codes. It didn’t start out being a group of stories, it just evolved. They came from the grassroots. They came from my own ideas and from my heart and in the end they did stand as a collection.” “It was so terrific to be nominated from the Sun because it is such a big paper and our executive editor has won two Pulitzer Prizes. I thought there’s no way I’ll go beyond the nomination stage. It was in early March when they called me at home one day and said I was a finalist and I thought I cannot believe this. To be a finalist, you always carry that distinction no matter what happens.” There were only three finalists out of 130-140 entrants. “I had been nominated three or four times before but I had never gotten this far. I just cannot believe I won a Pulitzer Prize! Is this real?!” Beginning on the crime beat Sugg became a medical reporter while at the Sacramento Bee after a stint as a reporter on the crime beat. In the middle of her time with the Bee, she received a master’s in journalism on a Kiplinger Fellowship at Ohio State University. When she returned to the Bee she switched from crime to medical reporting. “I began medical reporting in 1993 and it was right in the middle of the Hillary Clinton health care policy debate. So for the first couple of years I did a lot of coverage of health care policy, health care reform, managed care and how that was changing medicine. About two years later, in the beginning of 1995, I came here to the Sun and started covering medicine and started to do a little more in the line of discoveries and science. I think the common thread with the crime beat was my interest in the victims or the patients or the people behind what was really going on and for some reason last year a lot of that really came together.” “I realized that a lot of the questions I had were questions that many of our readers had because these topics haven’t been classic news stories. A lot of them haven’t been addressed in newspapers but I think people are hungry to read about these things. These are experiences people are having all the time in hospitals and doctor’s offices and in their own lives so for me I was already writing about the human side of things and I think my own health problems reinforced that and showed me the frustration people have.” Sugg suffered a stroke in 1990. Since then she has experienced neurological problems including seizures. She was misdiagnosed when she was told she had epilepsy. Dealing with difficult medical problems is hard for the writer as well as the patients and their families. “Actually my editor said to me, ‘You need a better mix. They said I was writing about death too much but to me they didn’t seem so much like death until the end of the year when I looked back on it but it was very moving, some of them devastating. I still remember talking to those people some on the phone and I would be sitting at my computer with tears streaming down my face. In the end they didn’t make you sad for long because there was always the strength of the families and there was always something important to be said. The stories were much more than just another human interest sad story. I felt they had a real skeleton, a real bony, strong skeleton that was news from medicine, health care or some information that people either needed to think about or be told or learn about. That was the reason that really pushed me on.” Euphoria “I received between 30 and 400 e-mails and about 100 cards and letters and lots of flowers. It has been a wonderful thing. I‘ve even heard from people I went to grade school with. One of my favorites was from June Lytel-Murphy [retired assistant professor of English and longtime adviser to The Villanovan] saying something like ‘There was no one I believed in more than you.’ And another one was from another Villanovan who wrote a card saying ‘Every since we graduated I’ve looked at the Pulitzer Prize list because I knew one day your name would be there and this week I looked and you were there. Congratulations!’ That was such a vote of confidence. And the reward, in addition to all the well wishes, was a collection of articles judged to be the best beat reporting for 2002. The award ceremony was held on May 29 in New York at Columbia University. Sugg described it as being held “in a really beautiful old building that resembled the Supreme Court building with a long white marble staircase with big white columns and a beautiful old room with a vaulted ceiling. I was fortunate to meet some of the historical people in journalism; The New York Times columnist William Safire, former managing editor of The New York Times Seymour Topping and Donald Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. To go up there in front of top editors and co-workers and to shake the hand of the president of Columbia and hold the Pulitzer in your other hand was a dream come true.” Path to editor in chief Sugg began her journalistic journey here at Villanova but for a time it looked as though it was not to be. “I chose Villanova by accident…but thank heaven. My father and I came up from Rockville, Md., to look at some colleges. We had just one day and for some reason we looked at St. Joe’s, Penn and La Salle and I didn’t like any of them. We finished by 1 p.m. and I thought I have no where to go to college and my father said, ‘Isn’t there a place called Villanova that an older boy from our church had gone to,” but I didn’t want to go. We drove our anyway. It was October and it was a beautiful day. We drove onto the campus and it was stunningly beautiful. There were people reading under trees and playing with Frisbees. Tolentine and the other old stone buildings were beautiful. We took a tour and I saw in the admission booklet that they offered a merit-based full-tuition scholarship and I thought, this could work out. I just had a good feeling about it and then I won the scholarship. Soon I realized they had the Honors Program which was terrific and really intense. “As a freshman I joined the band and played flute and trombone all four years. I mainly played the flute but they needed more brass so I taught myself trombone over the summer because we had one at home. I don’t ever know how I did it. I didn’t take lessons but I could play the fight song and a lot of the basics. It was the summer after my freshman year and sophomore the men’s basketball team went all the way to the final four in the NCAAs. That trombone took me all the way to that last game. I was in the first row of the band with my slide trombone actually standing on the court! I joined the newspaper around the second week of school as a freshman. I never worked for any kind of newspaper before but I thought I wanted to be a journalist because I was good at English, my major along with Honors, and I am good with people. I really didn’t know what I was doing and I was assigned to cover a career fair for graduating students. I wrote the story and turned it in. When Friday came around my friends and I picked up The Villanovan after lunch at the Pit as was the tradition. I looked all through the paper and couldn’t find my story. I guessed they didn’t run it that week. I closed the paper and there it was right on the top of the front page. That was my first jolt of having my story on the front page. Then I thought I might be half way decent at this but Villanova was really the place that nurtured me in so many ways and with so many friendships and I’ll never forget The Villanovan. I basically went from knowing nothing about journalism to an end feeling pretty confident in running that newspaper. What I remember now are not the specific stories but the sense of camaraderie we had there late on Tuesday nights and the pizza and running down to the printers in the middle of the night and watching young reporters coming up. I really feel I turned into a leader there, confident and strong. A lot of that came from June too because she pushed us to be accurate and smart and tough and professional at all times. Lytel-Murphy noted, “Diana was born to be a journalist in the very best sense of the word. She never lost her genuine niceness and her sensitivity to things the rest of us would just walk by.” Sugg graduated Phi Beta Kappa and currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Poynter Institute. Contact senior writer Holly Stratts at holly.stratts@villanova.edu