News article: Wait, Doesn’t Everyone Get a Pulitzer After a Few Weeks on the Job?

Times Insider shares insights into how we work at The New York Times. In this piece, the reporter Farah Stockman recounts a funny thing that happened on the way to her new desk.

It’s 5 a.m. on Monday, April 18, 2016. My alarm is going off. I’m sleeping sitting up, cradling a giant bottle of Tums. I’m eight months pregnant, which is to say I feel as if I’ve swallowed a bowling ball made of acid. I’m in no mood to climb out of my warm bed in Boston and catch a 6 a.m. train to New York.

But I’m the new kid on The New York Times’s political reporting team. I’ve been at the paper for less than a month, after 16 years at The Boston Globe. I’m still learning my way around the Times building: the mysteries of its elevators, the secret passwords to its dizzying array of systems, the faces that go with the famous bylines.

“I’ve got to get to New York,” I tell my husband. The political team meets every Monday at 11 a.m. I’m determined to be there. I want the editors who’ve hired me to know that they haven’t made a mistake; that I can still hustle, even if, at the moment, it looks as if all I can do is waddle. I’ve got a few weeks to prove my worth before I go on maternity leave.

My husband drives me to South Station in the dark. I get there early; so early, in fact, that I watch several iterations of the “see something say something” video along with a helpful public service announcement about how to behave if I ever encounter an “active shooter.”

I board the train and spend what seems like several hours waiting for the Internet to load. But I’m in a pretty good mood, because I know I’m going to arrive in time to make the politics meeting. Then I get to my desk in the newsroom and discover that it is no longer my desk. I’ve been moved clear across the room, to an unexplored region by the elevator. Juanita Powell-Brunson, Explainer of All Things Newsroom, offers to show me to my new desk.

As I cross the newsroom, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, accosts me. I’m sure he’s going to congratulate me on my first story, which ran on the front page of the paper. Instead he says, “Did you know that you’re a finalist?” I look at him blankly. Is he talking about the Pulitzer Prizes? Wouldn’t that be cool — to be a finalist? I think. But I have no idea. I have not been informed. “That’s above my pay grade,” I say.

I return to my new desk, which overlooks a window showcasing a billboard for the Museum of Sex. I memorize that as a landmark, just in case I get lost. I try to settle in. How do you set up the voice mail on this darn phone? What’s the password to my computer? How in the world do we file our expenses? The clock ticks toward 10:45 a.m. I’ve got 15 minutes left to get a cup of tea. When I return from the cafeteria, I see a note from Matt Purdy, a deputy executive editor, asking me to call him immediately. My heart seizes. Am I in some sort of trouble? Are they going to tell me that this new job — my dream job at The New York Times — has all been a terrible mistake?

Then Matt appears and asks me to follow him. I go sheepishly, like the new kid at school, summoned to the principal’s office. He leads me to a glass office with Dean Baquet and Arthur Sulzberger, The Times’s publisher, whom I once exchanged pleasantries with in a parking lot at a journalism conference but otherwise barely know. Arthur greets me warmly. He seems downright giddy.

“You won,” he tells me. “The Pulitzer Prize.”

It must be hard for folks who’ve spent their whole careers at The New York Times to understand how psychologically unprepared other reporters are to receive this honor of a lifetime. Most reporters don’t find out that they won the prize until they hear their name read out on television. That’s how Kate Kingsbury, my former colleague at The Boston Globe, learned of the prize last year. I distinctly remember standing in a furniture store in 2009 under a gaudy chandelier the moment I learned from the newsfeed on my phone that I had not received the Pulitzer.

But knowing hours in advance presents a quandary. Should I stay in my newly adopted newsroom, the one that informed me of what was to come? Or should I report to The Boston Globe, the newspaper that nominated me? Dean graciously offers to help me get back to Boston to celebrate with now former colleagues. But the mere thought of getting back on the train gives me a sharp pain in my belly, so acute I start wondering if I’m going to give birth here and now.

I decide to Skype in to The Globe’s newsroom, from my desk, with the Museum of Sex billboard in the background. I figure I’ll change from my maternity leggings and flip flops into an actual dress. But throughout the excitement and the discussions of logistics and protocol, the nagging feeling of an unfinished mission never leaves me.

It stays with me, until I finally slip into the conference room where the politics meeting is being held: late, but present, at 11:25.
What are the most important parts of this news article?
New to the job, the reporter Farah Stockman arrives at The Times and discovers she is a winner.