As the boundaries between newspaper, magazine, and online journalism continue to dissolve, the Pulitzer board announced Monday that it was broadening prize eligibility.
Magazines and their websites can now enter the Feature Writing and Investigative Reporting categories, previously only open to newspapers and online news outlets. Meanwhile, journalists from ineligible organizations—like broadcast news networks—who collaborate with newspapers and sites can now receive nominations too. This year, the investigative reporting Pulitzer went to a report on the Appalachian coal industry, but ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity squabbled over who deserved the credit. The prizes opened up fully to online outlets in 2009.
CJR spoke with Mike Pride, former co-chairman of the prize board, editor of the Concord Monitor, and recently appointed prize administrator to hear more about the new rules.
On the decision to open up the prizes:
What we’re seeing is that magazines on their websites are reacting to, covering, commenting on current events on a very ongoing basis. And that was the province of newspapers for so long. So why shouldn’t they be eligible?
On the timing of the announcement, with submissions opening Friday:
It’s a result of our process. There are two board meetings: One is in April when the prizes are chosen, and the second is in November. The board made the decision to take this step in late November. This is just the way it happened. The alternative would have been to wait another year.
On distinguishing between entries from a magazine and the same magazine’s website:
Some magazines could now try to say, “Our website is not really the magazine, and so we just want to enter as a website because that allows us into all categories.”
One of the issues you have then is do they publish the magazine content on the websites? And if they do, how can they argue that the two are not together? We’d like to keep the parameters of our experiment in the two categories.
On who gets to decide what is eligible:
The real answer in some cases is not going to come until they’re allowed into the competition and you read the work, and the juries and the board will decide whether they have met those standards. You do the best you can at the administrative level and then the real decisions are made by others farther along the line. I think our tendency would be to be broad. To allow in as much as possible.
On the decision to only open two categories to magazines:
For the last several years, the board has been looking at this issue and making small changes in bringing us forward, and this is a very big step. One of the reasons this is an experimental step is we want to see what kind of demands it creates for the organization in getting all this material properly judged by both the juries and the board. We don’t know what kind of volume we’re going to get until we try it.
On whether the Pulitzer prizes will continue to expand its categories:
I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable. But I would say that the board has a pretty good process for being forward-looking about these things, and I think the consideration of further openings is a certainty.
Just from a personal standpoint, if I look at criticism and commentary, those are areas that are really moving out of daily print journalism in some cases and onto the Web.
On the eligibility of journalists from partner organizations:
It’s a forward-looking process. We had the ABC-CPI dispute after the last awarding of prizes. And it just seemed to the board that it made sense to make sure that the main contributors to a project that was done in partnership between an eligible and an ineligible organization were rewarded. So that might in some cases include someone from a broadcast entity, for example. The broadcast organization itself would not be eligible for the prize but a person working for one would be.
On encouraging investigative journalism:
If I take a big picture view, some newspapers are losing the ability to do good investigative journalism and many of those partnerships between Web entities and other organizations are aimed at doing really good investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has a very important role in American journalism and those collaborations are making that a healthier part of journalism.
My own view is that on the feature side we’re going to get lots and lots of entries from magazines but from the investigative side, I’m a little more curious about just what the reaction will be, but we’ll see.
Chris Ip is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisiptw.