Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Online journalism shines in 2012 Pulitzer picks Posted: 16 Apr 2012 01:08 PM PDT
While newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times celebrate their wins on Monday, online-native sites Politico and the Huffington Post are also breaking out the bubbly. They won for editorial cartooning and national reporting, respectively. (Politico has a print edition, of course, but it’s hard to argue that it’s anything but webby in its metabolism — and in terms of where its audience is.) Of the 14 Pulitzer Prizes that were awarded for journalism, nine went to traditional newspapers. Of the five others, two went to HuffPo and Politico; one went to Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger; and two went to venerable wire services AP and AFP. (It was AFP’s first; it was AP’s 50th. The 14 journalism Pulitzers came in 13 categories; no one won for editorial writing, and two awards were given for investigative reporting.) UPDATE: It’s worth noting that the Denver Post’s Craig F. Walker won a Pulitzer for feature photography that appeared in an online-only series about an “honorably discharged veteran, home from Iraq and struggling with a severe case of post-traumatic stress.” The Huffington Post’s and Politico’s wins, in particular, feel like victories for their editorial models. While different from one another, both are fueled by aggressive web-native approaches — HuffPo built much of its audience on aggregation and free content from bloggers, and Politico’s fast pace aims to “win the morning” (and the afternoon, and probably the overnight shift too). But those strategies don’t have to be in conflict with doing the kind of quality work that can win Pulitzers — in HuffPo’s case, an eight-month, 10-part series on returning war veterans. After decades of having a comparatively narrow frame for potential entrants — television, magazines, and radio were kept out, for instance — the Pulitzers been open to online-only sites since 2009. With ProPublica becoming the first online news organization to win a Pulitzer for investigative reporting back in 2010. That same year, independent cartoonist Mark Fiore won the prize for drawings of his published on SFGate.com. ProPublica won another Pulitzer in 2011. This year, Pulitzer officials note that digital content “played a role in seven winning entries: Public Service, Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, National Reporting, Editorial Cartooning and Breaking News Photography.” Digital content was a particular emphasis in the breaking news category this year, with the call for entries that emphasize speed and real-time reporting that, “as quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.” The Tuscaloosa News picked up the prize in that category for “coverage of a deadly tornado, using social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 50 miles away.” Click here for the complete list of prize winners. Disclosure: Nieman Foundation curator Ann Marie Lipinski is co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Nieman Journalism Lab director Joshua Benton sat on the breaking news jury. |
| Why the Huffington Post doesn’t equivocate on issues like global warming Posted: 16 Apr 2012 08:28 AM PDT
HuffPost Science recently featured a story on former astronauts and scientists upset with NASA’s position connecting carbon dioxide to climate change. It’s not new to see sides clash on the issue, and any editor knows it’s a debate that will predictably spill over into the comment thread on a story. HuffPost Science senior editor David Freeman offered up this question at the end of his piece: “What do you think? Is NASA pushing ‘unsettled science’ on global warming?” One problem: The question violated one of the Huffington Post’s editorial policies. Not long after the piece was posted an editor’s note replaced the question, saying in part:
“The way the call for engagement was raised was as if we’re somehow agnostic about the reality of climate change,” Arianna Huffington told me. Huffington framed the incident for me as one of editorial policy. But this isn’t a simple case of clashing stylebooks, of one outlet favoring the Oxford comma and another leaving it out. This is something more akin to a policy position: Within the editorial confines of HuffPost, issues like climate change and evolution are settled, Huffington told me. That doesn’t mean divergent viewpoints aren’t welcomed, she said — just that on certain issues the reporting won’t offer up a false equivalency. “Where truth is ascertainable, we consider it our responsibility to make it very clear and not to — in the guise of some kind of fake objectivity, the media often pretend that every issue has two sides and that both sides deserve equal weight,” Huffington said. “That’s not the case, and that’s not our editorial stand.” Traditionalists might find the idea of a mainstream, general-audience news organization staking out these kinds of stances in news stories radical. Huffington doesn’t see it that way, saying that traditional media spends far too much time trying to provide balance on issues that are, within certain facts and other data, settled. For her journalists, she said, that means doing reporting that assesses facts and doesn’t “pretend that the truth is supposed to be found in the middle,” she said. “Editorially, we train our editors and reporters to basically not buy into what Jay Rosen calls the ‘View from Nowhere’ journalism,” she said. “We see our role more as doing everything we can to ferret out the truth, rather than be a kind of Pontius Pilate washing our hand of the possibility of truth.” That’s evocative of NPR’s new ethics guidelines, which make a similar distinction:
Along with HuffPost’s internal editorial guidelines, this incident also demonstrates the value of comments and engagement to its brand. (Huffington told me the site had 7 million reader comments last month.) After all, this wasn’t about anything in the body of Freeman’s work — just his call-to-engagement question to readers. Huffington Post standards editor Adam Rose told me they quickly added the editor’s note on Freeman’s story because they wanted to be transparent with readers about their editorial process. Instead of offering up a reworded question, they wanted to make it clear why the story had been changed. “I think it’s important that our readers know that and can trust that,” he said. “I think by being direct it develops a sense of trust with our readers who understand that we are not equivocating on the issue of climate change.” The story’s racked up more than 3,300 comments and counting — not an unusual number by HuffPost standards but not an insignificant one either. Rose said he, Freeman, and Huffington were pleased with the quality of the conversation in the comments of the story. This is where HuffPost’s stance on climate science and other issues has a practical element: The site is placing a marker to let readers know where it stands. Huffington says readers appreciate that kind of honesty and will reward news organizations for it. “Because we are clear about where we believe the truth lies, I believe we elicit a richer kind of response from our readers,” she said. It also helps in moving stories forward. The site already has a follow-up story to Freeman’s piece by reporter Lucia Graves that found that none of the former NASA personnel who signed the climate change letter actually worked in climate science. Elevating the level of online comments is a fairly decent, if not constantly shifting, goal, but Huffington sees the editorial guidelines as promoting something broader. “To be able to see clearly where truth lies on one side or the other, as it happened in this particular instance, is not to abandon objectivity — it’s to, in fact, embrace a higher standard of journalism,” she said. Image by JD Lasica used under a Creative Commons license. |
As far as awards go, the Pulitzer Prizes are the traditional standard of journalistic excellence. But this year’s winners, just announced, show that the judges continue to have an eye for new sources of quality journalism.
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