Pulitzers Decline National Enquirer's Entry, But That's Just Tip of the Iceberg (UPDATED)
UPDATE: Several weeks after this post was originally published, the Pulitzers reversed their decision and allowed the Enquirer's entry in.
If ever there was a story that put the vagaries of what constitutes the modern journalism business front and center it's this: the National Enquirer's decision to nominate its coverage of John Edwards affair and love-child with Rielle Hunter for a Pulitzer Prize. In case you are completely in the dark, here's the skinny on the story itself: the Enquirer provided scoop-after-scoop about the relationship, including that some aspects of the affair and its cover-up have led to a federal inquiry, before the mainstream media noticed a thing. In fact, it took almost an entire year for the mainstream media to start covering the story.
It's a fascinating tale of journalism operating on two parallel tracks simultaneously and also a great example of how most industries cope when the sand is shifting around them -- by pretending it's not. As Gawker points out, in the official media, coverage of John Edwards in 2008 was about his decision to eventually endorse Obama and his performance in the Iowa caucus; in the other, it was about what I will politely call "performance" of another sort.
The Pulitzer committee seems pretty tied up in its underwear about this. It recently said that it could not accept the Enquirer's entry on a technicality -- it's a magazine. (The Gawker post today, which really is a must-read, punches holes in just about every reason the Pulitzer Prize committee would have to not accept the entry. For instance, on the "it's not a newspaper" allegation, Gawker points out that in 2002, one Pulitzer finalist was a story in The New York Times Magazine, which, as it turns out, is a magazine.) It seems like the smart thing to do here would be to accept the entry and then pass it over for consideration like so many other wannabes. That way, you can safely sidestep the "elitism" tag.
But I digress. To get back to my central point, while there is no anachronism in furthering the cause of solid reporting, there is in limiting consideration for great reporting to only one part of the journalism machine, and this is where the Pulitzers, and the entire newspaper journalism community, need to wake up. Ironically, the story of tabloid journalists vs. ones at Respectable News Organizations is an old one; now the Internet has substantially expanded text-based journalism and commentary. The Pulitzers say the baseline criteria is this:
... entries may be submitted by any individual based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news site that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles. Magazines and broadcast media, and their respective Web sites, are not eligible.That almost makes it sound as though the Pulitzers were being more inclusive, but it's really not. While the definition above would seem not to exclude stand-alone news Web sites from eligibility, if you look at the list of winners, what you'll find is that, in every case, based on my perusal of the nominees and finalists over the Internet era, they are limited to the old guard: print newspapers, with only an occasional acknowledgment that this thing called the Internet even exists. Frankly, I found that not just surprising, but shocking.
So, while the focus of Pulitzer controversy these days is whether the Enquirer deserved to at least have its nomination accepted (it did), the bigger issue is this: that journalism is moving on, but the Pulitzer Prizes have not.