Imagine winning a Pulitzer Prize without knowing you entered.

That’s evidently what happened to Bloomberg News, according to an account by Lachlan Cartwright in the newsletter Breaker Media.

Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait got a call from his deputy Reto Gregori to tell him they won for a series by the company’s CityLab team.

It turns out that CityLab editor Kriston Capps entered the package on behalf of reporter Alexandra Lange without going through official channels.

When Pulitzer officials called Capps to inform him he told his managing editor Nicole Flatow who told Bloomberg executive editor of digital Katie Boyce (Rooney) who told Gregori.

It’s amusing to anyone familiar with Bloomberg’s operations because the company is run as a pretty tight ship.

Knowing both John and Reto, it is hard to suppress a grin imagining that call going down.

Topping it off, Cartwright’s reporting said there was speculation CityLab was going to be shuttered and winning the Pulitzer tabled that fate.

CityLab focuses on urban innovation, reporting on cities, communities, and neighborhoods. Bloomberg acquired the group from The Atlantic in 2020.

Lange won the Criticism category for a series that explored how public spaces and urban design shape family life, especially for children. The Pulitzer board praised it as “graceful and genre-expanding.”

Kudos to Lange for the reporting and kudos to Capps for going rogue, a choice that helped bring home the prize and save the day. Here is the link.

h/t to Chris Roush at Talking Business for pointing out.