The Pulitzer Prizes may be among the most prestigious of journalism awards, but they are by no means the only ones. There are prizes honoring visual journalism, copy editing, ethics in journalism, student journalism, and many, many more. (The Construction Writers Association, for example, administers yearly awards for feature writing, special reports, and editorials about, yes, the construction industry.)
Many have questioned the worth of such prizes, arguing that they tend to encourage long, prize-friendly series over the less impressive, but still vital, daily reports that news audiences need. But one obvious merit of the Pulitzers and their many counterparts is their overall cultivation of quality journalism: in celebrating journalistic excellence, prizes also encourage it. And, not for nothing, they also define it.
So, in honor of yesterday’s Pulitzer announcement, we ask you: If you suddenly found yourself with a few million dollars with which to endow a journalism prize…what would your award be? Would you invent a new prize for, perhaps, the newspaper or magazine or television industries? Or an award specific to online journalism, or to business model innovations? Overall, what journalistic qualities would your prize strive to stimulate and promote?
I like the award that former Washington Monthly publisher Charlie Peters has endowed. It's an award in Preventive Journalism -- reporting that exposes social and political problems and wrongdoing BEFORE the problem becomes so big it's too late to do much about it.
http://understandinggov.org/category/preventive-journalism/preventive-journalism-award/
As the folks at CJR's Audit have noted, there's value in the journalistic equivalent of the NTSB crash investigators who come in after a plane goes down and figure out what happened -- but what's even more valuable and laudatory is investigation that identifies dangers ahead of time (faulty engineering, poor aircraft maintenance or, um, abusive lending and overleveraged investments), early enough that there's actually time to do something to prevent or ameliorate the impact of a big crash/disaster/social ill/corrupt practice.
Even Peter's Preventive Journalism doesn't quite fit the bill, because it honors work done in the previous 12-month period. Sometimes it's hard to see the real value of great reporting until years later. So it would be nice to have an investigative journalism award that, a la the Nobel Prizes, honors work that has stood the test of time (not decades like the Nobels but certain two or three or five years.....)
#1 Posted by mw, CJR on Wed 22 Apr 2009 at 02:04 PM
We need a "TAO of Journalism" award -- for Transparency, Accountability and Openness. This would recognize any print, broadcast or online news media organization, website or blog that was: a) Transparent about what they do, how they do it and who they are; b) Accountable to the public in terms of willingness to admit mistakes and correct them promptly, invite citizen feedback, apologize if necessary (in other words, follow the SPJ Ethics Code's "Be Accountable" section; and c) Open to all the diverse voices in the community, including ideological diversity. This award might go to Public Editors, Reader Representatives or Ombudsmen in the mainstream media (although their numbers are dwindling), or to websites or blogs that were willing to fully engage on these three levels. The more that journalists embrace this approach -- which they demand of everyone else -- the more they will be trusted and maybe even liked, or at least respected.
#2 Posted by John Hamer, CJR on Thu 23 Apr 2009 at 02:04 PM