Columbia named a pair of new Pulitzer Prize chairs today to replace Paul Steiger, Wall Street Journal's managing editor, who had reached his maximum allotted tenure of nine years. And the new guns are about as far removed from the New York print scene as you can get.

Joann Byrd, a newspaper editor for 47 years, is currently writing a book about the Heppner, Ore., flood of 1903. Prior to her retirement in June 2003 from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Byrd was ombudsman at the Washington Post and had been executive editor of the Herald in Everett, Wash., for 12 years. She was a reporter and assistant city editor at the Spokane Daily Chronicle before joining the Herald. Byrd won the 2003 Society of Professor Journalists June Anderson Almquist Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism and was inducted into the University of Oregon Hall of Achievement in 2000.

Mike Pride has been editor of the Concord Monitor since 1983 and previously served as its managing editor. Under his guidance, the Monitor has garnered numerous national awards including the New England Newspaper of the Year Award, which it received 19 times. Before joining the Monitor, Pride served in the U.S. Army in the 1960s and was city editor of the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat. Pride, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, won the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for directing the Monitor's coverage of the Challenger disaster.

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