Interesting Pulitzer numbers
In our roundup of Monday’s Pulitzer Prize announcement, we noted in more than one place how this year’s Pulitzer Prizes were short on many medium-sized metro daily newspapers. My colleague, Rick Edmonds, wrote, “Among the Pulitzer Prize winners, where are the metros?”
But as we also pointed out, it’s hard to take just one year and make grand sweeping statements about the state of journalism. The Wall Street Journal, for example, wasn’t a finalist in anything and no one would suggest that the Journal is losing its fastball.
Still, Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab did a little math to come up with an interesting breakdown.
Benton writes that in 2022, finalists in the journalism categories included 17 newspapers, three radio outfits, two magazines, two wire services, one TV network — and five online news organizations (ProPublica, Futuro Media, Insider, The Marshall Project and Quanta).
Last year? Finalists included 13 newspapers, three magazines, two wire services, one radio outfit — and four online news organizations (ProPublica, Politico, Mississippi Today and Gimlet Media).
And this year? Eight newspapers, four wire services, three magazines, three TV outlets, one radio network — and 12 online news organizations.
Benton wrote, “That’s a big shift. Only eight newspapers producing finalists would have been unthinkable not long ago; it’s by far the lowest total since the Pulitzers began announcing the finalists (not just the winners) in 1980. And it’s not just the number of online finalists, it’s how local they are. It’s not just the big powerhouses like ProPublica and The Marshall Project competing at the highest levels; it’s also coming from places like Montgomery and Jackson, Honolulu and Santa Cruz.”
Again, this could be a one-year anomaly, a total outlier. Or it could be the start of a trend. We won’t know the answer for at least a couple of years.
Celebrating in style
One of the big Pulitzer Prize winners Monday was New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier, who won in Investigative Reporting for her stories on migrant child labor across the United States. She interviewed nearly 500 children over two years.
My Poynter colleague Amaris Castillo talked to Dreier, who is out on parental leave after having a child seven weeks ago. Dreier returned to the newsroom, with her baby, to celebrate winning the Pulitzer.
She told Castillo, “Maternity leave is so strange. It’s like I’ve sort of been in this, I don’t know, cave, and it was really great to suddenly be back in the world with all these other people who are doing this work every day. It felt even more dramatic because I’ve been so sequestered in baby land, and then suddenly I was back with a thousand journalists.”
About her work, Dreier said, “It was the most intense reporting I’ve ever done in my life, partly just because there was so much uncertainty. We never knew what we were going to find. It was impossible to set anything up beforehand, so you were always on this tightrope on a plane, wondering if you were going to totally fail to figure out anything on the other side.”
This is not Dreier’s first Pulitzer. She also won in 2019 for Feature Writing when she was at ProPublica.
Layoffs in Philly
According to the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer laid off five people on Tuesday. The union said the five included three photographers, one person in sports and another in the support center. Sportswriter Josh Tolentino, who had covered the Philadelphia Eagles the past three seasons, confirmed on X that he was one of the five.
As part of its lengthy statement, the NewsGuild said it was “disgusted and enraged” by the layoffs.
It also included this nugget that I hadn’t seen before: “This follows the elimination of 32 Guild members in February in what technically was a buyout but would have been layoffs had those employees not accepted buyouts.”
My colleague, Angela Fu, reached out to the Inquirer on Tuesday, following news of the layoffs, asking why there were layoffs and buyouts. Lisa Hughes, publisher and CEO of The Philadelphia Inquirer, said in an emailed statement, “Like almost every other media company over the past two years, we needed to adjust our workforce for long-term sustainability.”
Fu asked if the Inquirer was planning any additional cuts in the near future, and Hughes said, “We will continue to restructure our operating expenses as necessary as well as invest in growth areas such as digital subscriptions.”
The big story
