Beleagured New York Times Nabs Five Pulitzers; No Online-Only Winners
This story was written by David Kaplan.
While the New York Times doesn't have a lot to celebrate these days, the paper did get something to cheer about: it racked up five Pulitzers on Monday, the second-best year in its history. The awards were for breaking news, investigative reporting, international reporting, criticism and feature photography. Since the Pulitzers were first bestowed in 1917, the paper has won a total of 101 by its own count. Its best year was in 2002, when the paper received seven medals.
Aggregation sites shut out: This was also the first year online-only pubs were allowed to compete. There were 65 online-only entries this yearand 21 were shut out because these news sites mostly do aggregation with only some reporting, according to E&P. (Tabloid Baby's take.) Online sites had a part in seven of the 14 winners. The online-only judges included Stephen Engelberg (ProPublica); Kinsey Wilson (NPR); Joel Kramer (MinnPost.com); Margaret Wolf Freivogel (St. Louis Beacon) and Matthew Winkler (Bloomberg News).
St. Pete Time's website wins: It's not online-only but the St. Petersburg Times came close to winning Public Service for political truth-finding site PolitiFact.com. Instead, it was moved to the National Reporting and St. Pete was awarded that Pulitzer for "its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."
By David Kaplan