Story Review

The New York Times on Monday won five of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, and none of the other 9 went to an online-only news organisation.

On the one hand this seems to indicate that journalism, as practiced by traditional (monolith) media, is indeed in a very good shape and it is just the business side of things that is giving media companies trouble. On the other, it may mean that the Pulitzer Prizes have become irrelevant and fail to recognise great journalism of the new type.

The NYT has featured rather prominently in my reviews of great innovative storytelling and that has already prompted me to note that this firm’s financial problems are unlikely the result of poor or outdated journalism. But that is not by itself reason enough to confirm the Pulitzer Prizes as journalism’s topmost honour.

So the question is open: should we still seek to reinvent journalism, or has it already been reinvented and just needs the financing side tweaked a bit?

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Image by onesevenone.

Tags: award-winning journalism, death of the newspaper, Pulitzer Prizes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.