We don’t get a lot of emails from the Pulitzer Prize committee here at the Washington Free Beacon, so when I received one in November of last year asking me to serve as a member of a Pulitzer Prize nominating jury, I was sure it wasn’t real—possibly a sophisticated phishing attempt, or more likely a joke at our expense. As it turns out, the invitation wasn’t the joke—the Pulitzers were. The committee asked me to serve on the nominating jury for the National Reporting category. That meant reviewing the applications to that category and deliberating over them with four other jurors at Columbia University in February, narrowing the pool down to three finalists. Before doing so, I signed an agreement to keep my membership on the jury and our selection of finalists confidential "pending the formal announcement of the winners."