Mike Pride, Who Proved a Regional Newspaper Could Work, Dies at 76

Mike Pride, who remodeled 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 affect 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 stated.

As The Monitor’s managing editor from 1978 to 1983 and its editor till he retired in 2008, Mr. Pride received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for overseeing The Monitor’s eloquent protection of the loss of life 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 thought to be 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 main, 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 received the Pulitzer Prize for function images for her intimate chronicle of a household dealing with a mum or dad’s terminal sickness. Under Mr. Pride’s management, the New England Newspaper & Press Association named The Monitor New England newspaper of the yr 19 instances.

“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 every day gross sales belied its affect. 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 basically when the Legislature is in session.

During Mr. Pride’s tenure, The Monitor lined the elevation of David Souter, a former New Hampshire lawyer normal, to the United States Supreme Court; the wholesale launch of sufferers from psychological hospitals with out ample assist within the communities to which they had been being discharged; the Roman Catholic diocese’s efforts to guard monks accused of sexual abuse; and the appointment of the primary overtly homosexual Episcopal bishop.

Mr. Pride launched a various rotating collection of group 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 jot down extra lyrically. Thanks to the assist he earned from the publishers below whom he labored, the newsroom employees grew at one level to 46 from 18.

Like every other 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 extra time pay by which The Monitor was unsuccessfully arguing that reporters ought to be handled not as hourly employees 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,” stated 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 numerous 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 received 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 through the day on the University of South Florida in 1972. After commencement, he was employed by The Clearwater Sun, the place he finally 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 a whole lot 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.