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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."
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.
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I enjoy Fiore's work
I enjoyed his original works back in the day when he primarily pointed out the absurdities of our political system and the leaders thereof. Then he started actively pushing his own political viewpoint and ceased being funny. Jon Stewart has done much the same thing in the last year or so, though he still has occasional moments of genius. I forgive him for his political proselytizing when he roasts the media, particularly the cable media and it's 24 hour news cycle.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Other than being pro-healthcare reform I don't think Stewart's pushed any particular political viewpoint this year. Frequently it seems like he has to really stretch when he skewers Obama and friends, but I think that, other than Biden, that's mostly because Obama and his circle don't seem to run their mouths the way others have and therefore just aren't such easy targets.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.