First Pulitzer Awarded To an Online News Site

Hugh Pickens writes "The Columbia Spectator reports that ProPublica, an independent, non-profit online newsroom, is the first online organization to win a Pulitzer Prize. Propublica reporter Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her story about the deadly choices faced at one New Orleans hospital in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The winning article was published in the New York Times Magazine and on ProPublica.org. Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler says that ProPublica's model represents a mode of journalism that will become increasingly influential, as fewer resources for investigative journalism remain available at the disposal of news outlets. In addition to ProPublica, another online entry won for the first time in the category of cartooning — Mark Fiore was awarded a Pulitzer for his self-syndicated animated cartoons, which appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle website."

Fiore's Flash Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy Fiore's work, but the site is flash hell. Nobody in iPad land is going to see it....

Another first for the Pulitzers

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to note another first from this year's Pulitzers: Gene Weingarten became the only journalist in history to win the Pulitzer in feature writing twice. The award this year was for his piece Fatal Distraction [washingtonpost.com], the previous for Pearls Before Breakfast [washingtonpost.com]. Both are very well done (obviously; they both won the Pulitzer), but in a completely different style each time.

Re:The flip side of the coin

[nedlohs]

Did they not learn that reporters are supposed to report the news not be the news. Damn celebrity culture!

Except not quite

[ubernostrum]

Unless you carefully restrict your definition of "online" to rule out any online publication owned or operated by a company which also happens to have non-online ventures, this doesn't hold up: Politifact, a political fact-checking site, won a Pulitzer last year [politifact.com] for fact-checking the 2008 US federal election campaigns. Maybe you can make the argument that, because it's operated by a company which also prints papers, it's not really "online", but given that the whole operation was on the Web (and utterly dependent on the Web to work) I'd have a hard time accepting that.