MELVILLE, N.Y. — Newsday’s newsroom got an interesting tip last week: Its three gold medals for public service journalism had been listed on eBay and sold at a California auction for a total of $15,500.

The online listing had photographs of three gold medals that certainly looked like the ones won by the paper in 1954, 1970 and 1974, along with an extensive description of the medals as “three fabulously rare and never before offered gold Pulitzer Prize medals,” obtained “through an unlikely confluence of events” originating with a 2001 estate sale on Long Island.

This jolted Newsday officials and staff members. Their medals, they believed, had long been locked away in a safe at the paper’s headquarters (the medals mounted on a plaque in the executive offices were reproductions)……. Read Full Story