Paper Pulitzers

The prizes are meant to honour "excellence in journalism." So why nothing for web-based publications?

Yesterday’s announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners is a cause for celebration – in certain quarters at least. For although the Pulitzers claim to honour “excellence in journalism,” they have yet to venture fully into the digital domain. The prizes remain trapped in paper. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with print journalism. But a lot of good, if not great, journalism is now being produced on the web. It’s time the Pulitzers changed their tune.

That’s not to say online news went completely unrecognized. The Seattle Times win for Breaking News Reporting, for example, cites the paper’s “comprehensive coverage, in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee house and the 40-hour manhunt for the suspect.”

But for all its talk about online components, the Pulitzer committee obviously isn’t looking much beyond the world of newspaper journalism in awarding its prestigious prizes. Every single award in journalism this year went to a writer (or a team of writers) attached to a traditional newspaper. Not one went to someone working for a web-only outlet.

There will be many who will argue that the web doesn’t yet produce cutting edge journalism and that print still reaches the vast majority of the news reading audience. Some will also argue that traditional media still has bigger budgets. All three points are debatable and will only become more so as we move forward.

I am genuinely thrilled for the journalists who won; this is their Oscar. And as survivors in an American print environment that has been decimated by layoffs and closings over the last two years, the feeling is that much stronger. But does winning a Pulitzer mean you, dear reader, are going to read more papers? Will you now seek out the Des Moines Register because its photographer Mary Chind won for Breaking News Photography? (And wasn’t that shot of the airplane in the Hudson the shot of the year, by the way?) Does it mean you will stop reading, say, Slate.com? Or this website for that matter? (It must be noted that the award for editorial cartooning went to Mark Fiore, whose work has only appeared on SFGate.com, the first purely web-based award in the Pulitzer’s history.)

More and more of us are consuming vast amounts of information from very different sources. My own reading habits include some print papers, some magazines, and a large number of websites. Social media services like Twitter now clue me in to new developments almost as they happen (I learned of the recent tragedy involving the Polish president on Twitter a full 30 minutes before BBC and CNN posted the news online).

At least the Pulitzers haven’t created separate categories for web-based news. Print and web should be judged using the same set of rules. But in this day and age, I find it hard to believe that not one piece of web-based journalism was good enough to win anything. Not even a single award.