Christopher Mele (Photo provided)
SARANAC LAKE – Former Adirondack Daily Enterprise reporter Christopher Mele was among a group of New York Times staffers honored this week as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage.
The list of finalists and winners for the Pulitzer Prizes — chosen by jurors as the best in journalism, letters and the arts last year — was announced Monday and included awards for current affairs reporting, investigative reporting and local reporting, among other categories. Winning a Pulitzer Prize in journalism is considered one of the highest honors in the field.
Mele, 58, runs the New York Times’ breaking news desk, known as the Express Team, on weekends. The work that put his team in the running for a Pulitzer Prize began on a Sunday last year, January 9, 2022, when New York City’s deadliest fire in decades broke out in an apartment building in the Bronx.
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“Travel Cables”
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The first indication that a fire had started came around 11:15 a.m., Mele said, about 15 minutes after it started.
Mele was working from home at the time. He first learned that 10 people were injured in a Bronx high-rise fire, perhaps seven of them critically.
With breaking news, there are different levels of urgency and severity. Sometimes the event does little to change the course of history, change lives, or change the landscape of a place. Other times, it does. Over the years, Mele said he has developed something “sixth sense for things”, and has quickly learned to understand how big a story is and what kind of resources are needed to cover it.
“I’m Radar from MASH,” he said “I hear the helicopters coming.”
After the first reports, he started listening to the police scanner.
“It became more and more obvious how bad it was” he said
In breaking news, there is one “gold standard,” according to Mele. It’s a lesson many journalists learn throughout their careers. It’s a skill he used while reporting for the Enterprise from 1986 to 1988, when he covered Harrietstown and Saranac Lake, as well as a variety of other things depending on the need of the day. Making calls from a newsroom is one way to approach information gathering, but in the case of breaking news, it’s not the best way.
“The instinct is always to make sure you get there as quickly as possible,” he said “There’s nothing better than being on stage.
“It’s more about the idea of doing first-hand reporting and having access, photos, interviews, testimonies.” added.
For the Times Express team, “If things are exploding, dying, crashing, catching fire, (they’re) kind of trip wires,” Mele said. “We’re covering him first and holding the fort until we can get reinforcements.”
Mele’s role in the Times’ coverage of the Bronx fire was “In the very early stages, coordinating it, getting the first version of the stories,” he said This includes sending reporters and photographers to the scene.
At 12:36 p.m., the Times published its initial story about the fire, according to Mele.
Ultimately, 17 people died in the fire, including eight children, and 44 people were injured. A Times investigation found that the building’s main fire safety system, meant to compartmentalize the fire and slow the spread of smoke and flames to other areas of the building, had failed. Although no one died in the fire itself, smoke from the fire was able to quickly fill the building’s 19 floors because multiple self-closing doors did not close properly, the Times reported.
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honors
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The Times’ Pulitzer submission included seven articles created by a team of writers, editors, photographers, videographers, graphic designers and other news staff members. Mele estimated that in total, more than 100 people contributed to the paper’s coverage of the fire.
The Pulitzer committee cited the Times “Urgent and comprehensive coverage of New York City’s deadliest fire in decades, expertly combining cross-platform accountability reporting with compassionate portraits of the 17 victims and the long-standing Gambian community had called the Bronx skyscraper home.”
The Pulitzer Prize winners in the breaking news category were the staff of the Los Angeles Times, for reporting that revealed racist comments by Los Angeles City officials, which were recorded, and for coverage that followed from the reaction and subsequent conversations. on racial issues in local politics.
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Roots
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Originally from the Bronx, Mele came to Enterprise after graduating from college. He was 22 years old; the Enterprise was his first full-time reporting. He was hired by Bill Doolittle, a former owner, editor and publisher.
“When I started, I had no concept of the Adirondacks, small town politics or municipal government.” he wrote in a 2016 blog post. “I didn’t know a village table from an ironing board.”
At the time, the Enterprise had three reporters and a sportswriter, in addition to the sports and news writers. He remembers covering everything from municipal government to Saranac Lake schools, local jails and sometimes news from the neighboring town of Lake Placid.
Repeated exposure to lower types of breaking news, such as car accidents, helped prepare him for the type of breaking news he deals with now, such as mass shootings.
“I owe a lot of my early learning about breaking news from my days as a cub reporter cutting my teeth at the Enterprise.” Mele said in a statement.
After leaving the Enterprise, he joined the Plattsburgh Press-Republican in 1988, where he managed the Saranac Lake-Lake Placid bureau. He left the press in 1992.
He has worked as an investigative reporter and editor at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, as a business reporter at The Journal News in Rockland County and as executive editor at The Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He was hired at the New York Times in 2014.
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