The Pulitzer Prizes were announced a week ago, during our blogging break. Strange as it may seem to some new media types, I was eager to blog about them. You see, I think the Pulitzers give us something to think about.

As there is as yet no prize for blogging, those of you who enjoy predicting the exact date and time that newspapers will cease to exist may not be interested. But I am. I note the Pulitzers not only because I’m a journalist by profession, but because I’m interested in knowing about the things contained in some of the stories written by this year’s winners, all of which appeared in (gasp) newspapers.

I acknowledge and celebrate the impact of the political blogosphere in uncovering government hanky panky. I admire the immediacy of blogs written from the scenes of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or tragic crimes like the shootings at Virginia tech. But The Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal dug deep into the use of presidential signing statements, and back-dated stock option grants, respectively. Other journalists, most working for regional papers, exposed corruption, profiled people most of us know little about, and the impact of China’s economic boom on the nation’s infrastructure. They were able to do this because editorial budgets and staffs were still large enough to support investigative journalism that required days, weeks or months of reporting. The people who reported and wrote these stories added to the national conversation, just as surely as bloggers do every day. The people who still pick up a morning paper with their coffee (or who read it online) were informed, and perhaps moved to ask questions of their government.

The problem with “old media” newspapers is not the content itself, it is the inability to continue to prosper in a marketplace that has moved on. Blogging is a more democratic, more diverse medium for many readers, and newspapers who have not figured that out are suffering financially. But as blogging flexes its muscles, and as its leaders sneer derisively at newspapers, its practitioners and champions should also ask themselves how the infrastructure of blogging can be strengthened to provide the support needed for investigative journalism of the kind still practiced primarily by newspapers. When this happens, there will and should be a Pulitzer category (or more than one) for blogs and other new media outlets.

-shelly

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 6:07 am and is filed under Blog Entry. 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.