What the Pulitzers Tell Us About Newspaper Fortunes

Call it the Pulitzer Early Warning System. In perusing the list of well-achieved journalistic Pulitzers today, one fact cried out: all the major national news reporting awards went to big national media. The Washington Post won 4 and the New York Times won 3, testimony to importance of their continuing investment in investigative reporting in the national interest.

It's also testimony to the increasing split among the nation's newspapers. It's not by accident that the the Post and the Times have two-class stock structures, with family interests better able to insulate newsrooms from the now-apparent ongoing downturn in newspaper revenues and profits. It's not by accident that those papers with national franchises have a better chance of carving out national and global niches on the Web.

What was glaring in the Pulitzers was what was missing.

Tonight I ran across the thinking of Will Bunch. Will a Philly Daily News writer is a clear thinker, who writes perceptively about the current news industry morass. He summed up it well in his column, titled the "2006 Pulitzers ... and the Death of Local Reporting":

In fact, if you look closer at the Pulitzers, you'll see the sad toll that economics and job cuts have already taken on American journalism. The two big newspapers that survive by covering national and global affairs for a small elite gobbled up a whopping seven prizes between them. In a time when electronic voting scams and other voting problems have threatened democracy here at home, the Pulitzer for "explanatory journalism" went to a series on democracy...in Yemen.

Meanwhile, the Knight Ridder chain, under immense cost-cutting pressure, won just one Pulitzer, for its Biloxi hurricane coverage. Indeed, the newspapers with the steepest job cuts -- the Inquirer and the Daily News here, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, to name a few, were completely shut out.

Read the whole piece when you get a chance, and send it to friends, when they tell you that bloggers will replace the journalists disappearing from American newsrooms. 

This is the core of it: watchdog reporting is what we are in danger of losing as economic disruption caused by the Internet  proves inevitable. Yes, citizen journalists can report neighborhood news. Yes, we can pick and choose from a many fine film critics near and far. Yes, our favorite sports columnist may no longer be housed at the newspaper.  But reporting, that's something that's not an avocation and it may not be something that attracts big audiences or many paid search dollars.

That's the prize we have to keep our eyes on.