Pulitzer Prize Makes History
For the first time ever, an online-only publication has received a Pulitzer Prize. Sheri Fink of ProPublica shares the Investigative Reporting category prise with Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News.
Although Fink’s article about “the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.” was co-published by The New York Times Magazine, it originally appeared as an online article in a publication that has no print version.
Any thoughts on what this means for the future of online publishing and the ongoing electronic vs print publishing debate?
Tags: ProPublica, Pulitzer, Sheri Fink
That is cool.
i’m late to this one, but wanted to say how great ProPublica is. I just collaborated with them, in a minor way, at my day job at the paper. What I love about the organization is:
1 — its nonprofit nature. Takes away all the business world crap that has done journalism great violence.
2 — its dedication to the hard, often boring work of deep journalism.
3 — its vision for teaming up with existing organizations, and for refusing to envision its online model as somehow other or anti. It works with the New York Times, this American Life, and online sites.
That to me is crucial. ProPublica sees its job as increasing the amount of investigative journalism in the world, not marrying itself to the web or the newspaper or the radio. BUT, it does that while sticking to basically a newspaper model of how to do this work, a model that values depth and context, not the more ephemeral, brief or summarized values that often — not always — dominate other mediums.
Thanks Shawn! You just made me fall in love with ProPublica.