Concord Monitor Editor Emeritus Mike Pride Dies at 76

Print More

Mike Pride

Mike Pride of Concord, the former long-time editor of the Concord Monitor and a nine-year member of the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes, died Monday, April 24, 2023, at age 76.

Pride, according to an announcement by the Concord Monitor, had a blood disorder and died in Florida. He was named managing editor at the Concord Monitor in 1978 and became editor in 1983. During his tenure of 25 years as editor, the newspaper earned many awards, both regional and national.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Pride retired from the Monitor in 2008, returning for a several-month stint in early 2014 as editor during a management transition. He was administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes from 2014 to 2017, becoming the first and only former member of the Pulitzer board to hold the position.

In recent years, Pride has authored or co-authored several books on the Civil War and World War II. His recent book, “No Place For A Woman,” recounts the life of Concord’s Harriet Dame, a 46-year-old dressmaker running a boarding house turned infirmary for the ailing soldiers of the First New Hampshire Regiment during the Civil War.

Pride grew up in Florida and attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida and the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fla., receiving a B.A. in American studies. He was a veteran of the U.S. Army and served as a Russian linguist from 1966 to 1970. In his early career, he was a sportswriter for The Tampa Tribune and city editor of the Clearwater Sun and the Tallahassee Democrat. He also worked at the St. Petersburg Times.

He completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1985 and received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for overseeing coverage of the death of Teacher in Space  Christa McAuliffe, also from Concord.

He was author or co-author of eight books. He was the co-editor, with former staff member Felice Belman, of “The New Hampshire Century: Concord Monitor Profiles of One Hundred People Who Shaped It” (2001). Belman succeeded him as editor of the Monitor and is now deputy metro editor at the New York Times. Pride also co-authored, with Mark Travis, another Monitor staffer, “My Brave Boys: To War With Colonel Cross and the Fighting Fifth” (2001). He co-authored, with Steve Raymond, “Too Dead to Die: A Memoir of Bataan and Beyond” (2006), and with Meg Heckman, “We Went to War: New Hampshire Remembers” (2008).

He was the author of “Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union” (2012) and “Storm Over Key West: The Civil War and the Call of Freedom,” (2020).

He referred to himself on Twitter under his handle as @HomerGlick, editor emeritus of the Concord Monitor; art, history and poetry lover; writer, author; happy husband, and goofy grandfather.

He was married for 53 years to Monique (Praet) Pride, the father of three sons and grandfather of six.

Comments are closed.