Online News Still Hasn’t Won A Pulitzer

The Pulitzer’s were announced today and Pro Publica, the online investigative enterprise, snagged one. It’s being hailed as a triumph of online journalism which…makes absolutely no sense. Here’s why: even though Pro Publica itself is an online institution that often publishes its content at its website, this particular piece of journalism was published in The New York Times magazine. So what makes that different than a writer for, say, Slate magazine, who publishes some serious piece of journalism in The New Yorker? Furthermore, the report at the Times pretty much admits that this isn’t a pure online journalism win:

Over the last few years, the Pulitzer Prize board has relaxed the eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online; this year there were many such submissions, though none of them won.

(emphasis mine) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this makes Sheri Fink (the author of the Pro Publica/Times magazine article) any less deserving, but she is not the person that broke into otherwise unexplored territory for online investigative journalism or online journalism for that matter. When an online news outlet wins a Pulitzer, it will be without the help of a major print newspaper like the Times. That hasn’t happened yet.

–Daniel Strauss

Photo by Katerha used under a Creative Commons license.