Through the Pulitzer Prism: Multimedia, Daily Winners That Are No Longer Daily, and Times Perserverance
The news industry's Oscars are in. Though there are many other awards that recognize good, great and distinguished work, it is the Pulitzer name and brand that still connotes the highest accolades of the year.
We spend most of our time these days, understandably, writing about daily journalism's busted business model. It's worth taking a moment to make several quick observations about today's prize announcements:
- What's busted about journalism is the daily business model, not the journalism. The journalism has always had its high and low points. We fete the high ones, lampoon the low ones and try to do better next week and next year.
- Look at the list, and you notice several things about the newspapers named.
- The New York Times, of course, stands out proudly with five prizes. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Spitzer scandal, the co-opting of retired generals, the Obama Revolution in photos and top-notch art criticism all attest to the what the Times manages to turn out, in the face of pressures, cutbacks and endless second-guessing. In the hail of debate about the Times' and journalism's future, let's not lose sight of its contribution to national knowledge and debate.
- The top two Pulitzer dailies for local are no longer really daily. The Detroit Free Press staff, led by Jim Schaefer and M.L. Elrick, won for their investigations into former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's "pattern of lies." A half a continent away, the East Valley Tribune, led by Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin, won for their look at the impacts of the tenure of infamous Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio. You can still buy both papers, but not so easily and not every day of the week. The Freep is available by home delivery three days a week, with slimmed-down versions available at newsstands the other days. The East Valley Tribune announced just last week it was dropping its Saturday edition, reducing publication to just three days a week, after announcing in October it would become one of the first dailies to drop to four days a week last year. So the top two local papers — by this year's Pulitzer — are no longer really daily.
- The winner of the Pulitzer for cartooning, Steve Breen, now works for private equity owners who may have bought the paper more for its real estate than journalistic value. Bought for less than $100 million, the Union-Tribune will undoubtedly be the subject of significant cuts last year — and the cartoonist position (hey, what's the ROI on that?) — will certainly get scrutiny. Already, at least 29 editorial cartoonists have lost jobs in the last three years.
- The Miami Herald, with Patrick Farrell, winner of the Breaking News Photo Pulitzer, has been on the sales block for months. No takers at a price, its owner, McClatchy, considers worthwhile.
- Lastly, worth noting that East Valley Tribune series was one that embraced the web as a storytelling platform. Overall, seven of the 14 winners included some "online content" in their submissions. At the Tribune, staff used extensive multimedia and careful analysis of databases, then make publicly available, to tell its story. We've seen the inroads of multimedia story-telling, but we can see the ball being moved slowly down the field as some journalists more fully embrace the wondrous tools of the day.