National Enquirer Now Legit, According to Pulitzer Prize Board

Feb. 19, 2010 — -- The National Enquirer is now legit, according to the Pulitzer Prize Board.

The body behind journalism's most prestigious award conceded Thursday that the self-proclaimed tabloid can compete with mainstream news outlets for its prizes. Because it broke the story about former presidential candidate John Edwards's mistress and love child, the Enquirer's staff is eligible for the Pulitzer in two categories: "Investigative Reporting" and "National News Reporting."

"We'll see what happens," National Enquirer executive editor Barry Levine said today. "We want to see now that the Pulitzer people review our submission and we expect, obviously, that there's going to be tremendous competition in the investigative category and in the national reporting category."

To detractors who contend the supermarket tabloid isn't worthy of commendation, Levine said, the proof is in his paper's reporting.

"The fact that we may package this story along with the types of stories involving celebrities that are not typical of newspapers that the Pulitzer committee may look at on a yearly basis has nothing to do with the reporting," he said. "That persistence, that old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting that we exhibited on this story, at the end of the day, is what the Pulitzer committee recognized."

The news comes a month after the Pulitzer Prize Board administrator said the National Enquirer was "ineligible" for an award. When Edwards confirmed in January that he fathered a daughter with the campaign's hired videographer Rielle Hunter, the Enquirer announced it would submit its reporting for the prize, calling its work "good, old-fashioned reporting."

Besides forcing Edwards to finally admit paternity, the National Enquirer's revelations have also led to a federal investigation into whether Edwards' campaign broke any laws by continuing to pay Hunter after she stopped working for the campaign.

According to the Pulitzer's rules, however, the Enquirer was ineligible on a technicality.

"We checked the Enquirer Web site, and it apparently calls itself a magazine. Under our rules, magazines [both print and Web versions] and broadcast entities are ineligible," Sig Gissler wrote in an e-mail to ABCNews.com last month.

Furthermore, the upcoming prize awards stories written only in 2009. Given that the bulk of the Enquirer's reporting was done in 2007 and 2008 during the presidential campaign, the Enquirer would be ineligible on further grounds, Gissler said.

Today, however, Gissler said, "We don't publicly discuss entrants. I can only say that we apply the eligibility criteria and if an entrant meets the criteria, we accept the entry."