What About The Journalistic Little Guy?

The George Polk Awards for this year just came out. The list is pretty impressive, there’s been a lot of good journalism (David Grann, one of my favorite journalists out there, won the Award for Magazine Reporting for his story, Trial by Fire). One thing that strikes me from this list is that, with the exception of the Award for Local Reporting, all the recipients work at operations that are extremely well funded. Bloomberg, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Pro Publica. These are operations with an amazing amount of money—albeit not as much as they used to have.  The fact that news outlets like these won George Polks but not, say, The American Spectator or In These Times, suggests either that there’s too much attention given to the reporting over larger media or that it’s easier to produce high quality journalism with oodles of money. I pray the former is true and the latter is false.

–Daniel Strauss