I wonder if the Pulitzer jurors and board feel as I do, that we’re still in about the third inning of this profound and historic event and its aftermath. The virtuosity of Eisinger and Bernstein’s work aside—and it was virtuous indeed, as we said as the series unfolded—perhaps the best thing about it was that they decided to keep after the story after others had foolishly moved on. I always thought that was nuts, especially if you have the words “Wall Street” in your name.
I’m sure Bloomberg News, which has long sought a Pulitzer, is disappointed it, too, didn’t win. But the Bloomberg entries that made it among the finalists, as good as they were, also didn’t deal with the crisis, the business story, the story, really, of our time.
The FCIC report and supporting documents are yet to be fully mined. That goes double for the Levin-Coburn report and supporting documents (links here).
Do we really think we’ve gotten to the bottom of this event or taken control of the narrative?
The Audit’s takeaway: Go after the big important thing, and the Pulitzers will take care of themselves.
It might make an interesting topic--are the Pulitzers out of focus, or even in certain ways obsolete?
[NYT: April 19, 2011, 11:17 AM Reuters Brings In New Leadership By JEREMY W. PETERS. Thomson Reuters, which is trying to move beyond its roots as a news service, announced several strategic changes on Tuesday that will reorient the company under a new leadership structure. [...]
Also joining the new Reuters team is Jim Gaines, a former top executive and editor at Time Inc. who was managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines. Mr. Gaines had most recently been managing editor at The Daily, News Corporation’s new tablet newspaper. In his new role at Reuters, he will be head of ethics, standards and innovation. [...]
“It’s an interesting challenge because you have an organization that is built to be a news wire, a news agency, to be fast. But it hasn’t been built to do in-depth investigations,” he said. “We need to do both.”]
Interesting background: [New data partner for World University Rankings (in The Times Higher Education): 30 October 2009 By Phil Baty. Times Higher Education signs deal with Thomson Reuters:
Times Higher Education has signed an agreement with Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading research-data specialist, to provide the data for its annual World University Rankings.]
Pulitzer could enter the field of ethics and standards forcefully. For example, I would give The New York Times's Public Editor high marks for 2010-11, but 2011-12 should mean more resources and a powerful concentration of those resources. We might have expected The Economist's Economic "Intelligence" Unit to have performed the decisive analysis by now of the relationship between The Washington Post and Kaplan, and Thomson Reuters and The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the opportunity costs of inertia and shallowness in those interfaces.
Thomson Reuters has not done a good job of systematically pinpointing pathologies in university behavior, such as at LSE and Harvard (Libya). More insidiously, it has failed to grasp that there has been an order of magnitude surge in the complexity index in the world over the past two decades, in economics, politics, and in university life.
The adaptation of universities has usually been to shelter in triviality, 1950s-style cardboard-box admissions procedures that treat young adults as junior-high kids, suspicious undergrad cash-cow business programs, and university presidents finally totally causally disconnected from reality.
We react to Washington Post--Kaplan and Thomson Reuters--Times Higher Education partnerships as if there were no implications such as dilution of the purposes of journalism and attenuation of university research and teaching focus in the laundry of media information triviality.
I would like to see an Ethics Pulitzer in 2012 that reflected far deeper analysis. I would also like to see The Washington Post shed its relationship with Kaplan, and Thomson Reuters to admit that it has no business handling data for World University Rankings unless it does it independently. With the most robust ethics.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Tue 19 Apr 2011 at 01:45 PM
worth noting that the WSJ had the Magnetar story long before PP. And the WSJ wrote it big, 3100 words from the front page. It wasn't a series. while it connected the dots, it wasn't as strident as the PP pieces. and the timing, pre-Lehman, pre-bailouts, pre worst of the foreclosure mess, didn't do it any favors for a pulitzer committee looking for scalps....
Wall Street Wizardry Amplified Credit Crisis --- A CDO Called Norma Left 'Hairball of Risk'; Tailored by Merrill Lynch
By Carrick Mollenkamp and Serena Ng
3136 words
27 December 2007
key lines:
Norma [the name of the CDO] illustrates how investors and Wall Street, in their efforts to keep a lucrative market going, took a good idea too far. Created at the behest of an Illinois hedge fund looking for a tailor-made bet on subprime mortgages, the vehicle was brought into existence by Merrill Lynch &Co. and a posse of little-known partners.
In its use of newfangled derivatives, Norma contributed to a speculative market that dwarfed the value of the subprime mortgages on which it was based. It was also part of a chain of mortgage-linked investments that took stakes in one another. The practice generated fees for a handful of big banks. But, say critics, it created little value for investors or the broader economy.
#2 Posted by Steve, CJR on Tue 19 Apr 2011 at 10:40 PM
To win Pulitzer Prizes in financial reporting, you have to understand finance and have a well grounded historical perspetive. Most finance journalists do not have this basic chip.
#3 Posted by Mike Robbins, CJR on Wed 20 Apr 2011 at 12:44 PM
I think one of your advertisements caused my internet browser to resize, you might want to put that on your blacklist.
#4 Posted by momochi, CJR on Fri 22 Apr 2011 at 02:58 PM
Is the WSJ shut out of Pulitzers unfairly because of prejudice against Murdoch? Possible. That I don't know. Good question....Not exactly sure Columbia's J-School is a bastion of leftist liberalism.
I do think WSJ's Julia Angwin is good, but the What They Know series did not tell me much I didn't already know and neither did the latest story on the iPhone collecting user data. WSJ itself collects(and shares) data on its users. Just read their privacy policy. So is "What They Know" a cover: a protest too much?
#5 Posted by Merlinaut, CJR on Mon 25 Apr 2011 at 07:46 AM