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Biography

Mike Pride is an amateur historian, freelance writer and editor emeritus of the Monitor.

Before his retirement in 2008, he was editor of the Monitor for 25 years and managing editor for five years before that. The Monitor won many awards during his editorship, including the first Pulitzer Prize earned by a New Hampshire newspaper. While he was editor, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Time magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review each cited the Monitor for excellence.

Pride served for nine years on the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes, retiring as co-chairman in 2008. He is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has twice been a Hoover Media Fellow at Stanford University. In 1987, he received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year award for directing the Monitor’s coverage of the Challenger disaster.

The 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary was the eighth in which Pride either supervised or participated in the Monitor’s coverage. He hopes to cover more primaries as a free-lancer and columnist for the Monitor. In 2004, he co-taught a course in presidential politics at Gettysburg College. He has also led battlefield tours at Gettysburg.

Pride is the co-author of My Brave Boys, a Civil War history; Too Dead to Die, a book about a Florida man who survived the Bataan Death March; and We Went to War, a book of World War II oral histories. He was co-editor of The New Hampshire Century, which profiled 100 people who helped shape the state’s history during the 20th century. His latest book is an updating of Elwin L. Page’s Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire. He is currently researching a book on the antislavery movement in New Hampshire.

Pride is a 1972 graduate of the University of South Florida, where he majored in American studies and did graduate work in American history. He was a Russian linguist in the U.S. Army, serving from 1966-70. Before moving to New Hampshire, he worked for the the St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune, the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat. Pride lives in Concord with his wife Monique, a retired teacher. They have three grown sons and four grandchildren.