Pulitzers let door creak open to more online materials

Steve Safran November 28th, 2006

The Pulitzer Prizes will now allow submissions from some more online efforts. Last year, you may remember, the Pulitzers started considering online work, but only still pics and written reports. A press release from the Pulitzer board says that “newspapers may now submit a full array of online material-such as databases, interactive graphics, and streaming video-in nearly all of its journalism categories.” The key word here is newspapers. The Pulitzer Prizes are still newspaper-centric, and that is only to their own detriment. They are missing out on “a full array of online material” that doesn’t originate in newspaper newsrooms. Also, Steve Yelvington notes of the rules, “…the online material “must depict its original publication on the Web, not its subsequent update or alteration.” That’s a distressingly static approach in an increasingly conversational world and locks out some great new approaches to doing serious journalism on the Web.”