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First Pulitzer Awarded To an Online News Site
Hugh Pickens writes "The Columbia Spectator reports that ProPublica, an independent, non-profit online newsroom, is the first online organization to win a Pulitzer Prize. Propublica reporter Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her story about the deadly choices faced at one New Orleans hospital in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The winning article was published in the New York Times Magazine and on ProPublica.org. Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler says that ProPublica's model represents a mode of journalism that will become increasingly influential, as fewer resources for investigative journalism remain available at the disposal of news outlets. In addition to ProPublica, another online entry won for the first time in the category of cartooning — Mark Fiore was awarded a Pulitzer for his self-syndicated animated cartoons, which appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle website."
I enjoy Fiore's work, but the site is flash hell. Nobody in iPad land is going to see it....
nt
Propublica is pretty awesome, and their recent piece about Magnetar, and the market crash is a great example of that. http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism. Newspapers claim they are loosing money because of internet news and thus can't afford to do investigative reporting. Propublica and wikileaks are the other side of that coin.
Deconstruct the State
Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to note another first from this year's Pulitzers: Gene Weingarten became the only journalist in history to win the Pulitzer in feature writing twice. The award this year was for his piece Fatal Distraction, the previous for Pearls Before Breakfast. Both are very well done (obviously; they both won the Pulitzer), but in a completely different style each time.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Another closely watched entry in this year's competition was National Enquirer's outing of John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter.
I guess the Enquirer didn't win. Othewise, it would have been another first - a Pulitzer awarded to a tabloid.
Sheri Fink certainly deserves recognition for her compelling story, but surely PJ over at Groklaw also deserves recognition from the mainstream media for her amazing work over the years.
Really? The editor over there is named Sig Gissler?
Maybe I should buy stock now, because I am reminded of a classic passage from HHGTTG:
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
They should have given it to Wikileaks...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
If anyone should get a prize for real journalism it should be Alex Jones of infowars.com. He has made over 15 documentaries on NWO, police state, Obama, etc.
Check it out people time is running out.
Should have gotten a Pulitzer for his reporting and photography in Afghanistan.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
...Rupert Murdoch is raging, yelling, and throwing things, and plotting a way to destroy ProPublica.
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BMO
ProPublica does ORIGINAL NEWS REPORTING AND INVESTIGATING! They do not simply look for work SOMEONE ELSE has already done, link to it, throw some Generation Slacker 3.0 commentary and proclaim they are a real journalist, all while never leaving their mom's basement. ProPublica pounds the sidewalks, looks for stories and then creates something original.
You want your press pass and freedom of the press cred? Do the same, instead of being a non-contributing leech riding the coattails of real journalists.
...is in bed, WITH UR MOM!!!
So a body that represents the status quo has given an award to some mainstream journalist who decided to publish their stuff on the web. They completely ignored wiki-leaks, and other sites that are focusing in on issues that will actually affect our society, and instead focus on journalists who worry about such important issues as Papal sex scandals that happed 20 years ago. The reason people are not tuning into TV / newspapers is not because of competition from this newfangled interweby thing, it is because they have been catering to the lowest common denominator so long, that there is no-one left. If it is a choice between watching morning news and watching a Sponge bob Square pants episode, i am you will be better off watching and animated sponge.
We need a real journalistic body that can recognize investigative journalism when it exists. How about giving an award to all the people who predicted the financial melt down 10+ years ahead of time.
Unless you carefully restrict your definition of "online" to rule out any online publication owned or operated by a company which also happens to have non-online ventures, this doesn't hold up: Politifact, a political fact-checking site, won a Pulitzer last year for fact-checking the 2008 US federal election campaigns. Maybe you can make the argument that, because it's operated by a company which also prints papers, it's not really "online", but given that the whole operation was on the Web (and utterly dependent on the Web to work) I'd have a hard time accepting that.
I thought so, too, but then I found out that if you point out that someone shouldn't accuse a FOSS developer of "extortion" your comment will get deleted. Theirs? Will get edited to remove just that one sentence. And she's being sneaky. I posted there for years now, but now I find out that if she doesn't like your comment, she hides it from everyone else. You see it, but no one else does. I could understand if it were a troll post, but what's trolling about pointing out that Red Hat & Google are CCIA members when everyone else is acting like being a member is a link to Microsoft?
You can't debate anything over there fairly any more if you disagree with her. I'm starting to wonder if I've finally found out why AllParadox and Marbux moved on. She'll call or implicate anyone of "trolling" (even for such things as allegedly living somewhere in the state of WA... because she "didn't fall off a turnip truck") if they post facts and citations, but she doesn't agree with them. I believe one rationale she gave in one reply was that answering these things was "taking too much time" from her research even though I linked to all kinds of information she hadn't considered. Granted, I also found past Groklaw stories where we discussed the same laws in a very, very different light. You know, like when we talked over parol evidence (that's evidence about what a contract means that is not, itself, in the contract--we covered it over 50 times I think, or so Google indicates) and talked about how SCO was trying to weasel out of a clearly worded contract. But I guess "for the purposes of this pledge, all licenses approved by the OSI" as of a certain date is "unclear" or somehow "reasonably susceptible" to an alternative interpretation that the software itself becomes non-OSS if it's part of a commercial offering (you know, like Red Hat's offering of Linux).
Yeah, great journalism there. It's really sad, because she was even fair to SCO at first, and I honestly respected her for that. But now she sees conspiracies everywhere and is trying to tie a legal defense of EULAs to a defense of the GPL. I'm not buying it. You're free to, and she's free to write whatever she wants, but please remember that she's not reporting any of the facts she disagrees with, even while simultaneously complaining that the folks she's accusing of conspiracy with Microsoft don't link to her coverage! For example, look at the four-letter TurboHeracles exchange and tell me who mentioned infringement first? (Hint: it was IBM.) Or ask how one can say that IBM was "baited" into listing patents that were part of its pledge when the third TH letter mentioned both the pledge and that Heracles was open source. Almost everyone asking for a correction on any of those points has had their post removed, and not just me.
It's her site and she can ban people who use the letter 'e' if she wants to. I won't claim it's censorship; that's an old flame war and I don't care what we call it. But I personally think it's a sneaky, dirty, underhanded way of silencing those you disagree with and I don't think it upholds the spirit of open research, sharing and education that I thought the site stood for. You're free to disagree with me. You're free to trust PJ over some guy you don't know. But when you disagree with me, I won't pretend to give you a fair hearing and then sneakily silence you.
I actually have proof of what I said about comments vanishing. I really want to put it up somewhere and let my comments speak for themselves. But Megaupload won't let me activate the account and I don't know where to put them. But I have screenshots proving what I said about that and I sure wouldn't mind showing them to someone. Sadly, I think that the Library of Congress will end up archiving a whitewashed site.
American political debate in C: while (1) { printf("Left wing talking point\nRight wing talking point\n"); }
Since it's not really off topic on a media-related discussion: is there really a left-wing talking point in american media? I thougt all left-wing speakers had been silenced long ago?
This is great news! ProPublica is such a great project.