Results matching “the pulitzer prize of”

Politifact Texas recently asserted that statements that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst made about kidnapping in Phoenix were "FALSE" (their capitalization). In reaction to politifact's assessment, Dewhurst said: "This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group. It shouldn't be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven's sake." Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize winning project created by Bill Adair of the Saint Petersburg Times, devotes itself to exposing lies and half-truths told by politicians.

As print papers collapse and move their operations online, the advantages of online-only publications become increasingly clear.  But there are also some things that print newspapers are capable of which are difficult for online operations.  This was the subject of a discussion between Pulitzer-prize-winning former Boston Globe journalist Walter Robinson and Clay Shirky, an expert on the interactions between the internet and the media held at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University this week.

Robinson broke the kind of story that Shirky feels is not possible for online news organizations.  He led a team of Boston Globe reporters who filed a series in 2001 on the priest abuse scandal that led to corrective action taken by the Catholic Church.  Shirky feels that online publications don't have the necessary resources to waste, the time to spend, or the institutional presence to back them up, reports Nieman Journalism Lab.

Last week, the former European correspondent for Newsday, Roy Gutman, was awarded the key to the city of Sarajevo as well as honorary citizenship to honor him for his reporting of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-1995 war.

"I'm walking on air," Gutman told Media Gaggle. "It's a terrific honor."

His coverage of the Bosnian war exposed a network of concentration camps run by Bosnian Serbs where mostly Muslim Bosnians were beaten, raped, and often killed. His reporting drew international attention to the Bosnian conflict and led to the closing of a number of these concentration camps. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that these closures saved 5,000 to 6,000 lives.

Last night the Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism were awarded with some surprising results. ProPublica, the non-profit online investigative journalism organization, stood out as the evening's most notable winner in a crowd dominated by more traditional news outlets. 

As the latest news from Tuesday's earthquake outside of Port-au-Price trickles in to the mainland, newspapers have faced many of the same logistical challenges as rescue crews as they struggle to cover the scale of destruction wreaked on this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation.

With only one foreign correspondent based in Haiti, Jonathan M. Katz of the AP, many major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal struggled initially to get their journalists on the ground. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake had destroyed what little infrastructure Haiti already had, razing government buildings, hospitals, and homes. Telecommunications and power lines have been unreliable if present at all.

The Pulitzer Prize is once again updating its criteria to fit with the changing face of news reportage.  The Pulitzer Board had changed the criteria last year to allow entries from non-print newsrooms as long as they were "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing events."  This year, they went a step further and are accepting entries form any Internet-only publication as long as it is published at least weekly. 

In the words of the Board, nominations must be from "a text-based United States newspaper or news site that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles."

The East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, which has previously announced it would shut down on 31 December, has received a letter of intent to purchase the troubled paper from a Tuscon newspaper publisher.

The Valley Tribune's parent company Freedom Communications said earlier this month that the paper has been up for sale for a considerable amount of time, yet received no promising bids and announced it would begin taking steps toward closure.

The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau, it was widely reported yesterday. Journal managing editor Robert Thomson said in a memo to colleagues that "the economic background to the closure is painfully obvious to us all." He added that "an investigative function" would remain but that the core reporting team would be disbanded.

The nine reporters affected will be able to apply for openings elsewhere in the paper, Thomson said. The investigations group, several of who were part of a team awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for a series of articles about stock-option backdating, will remain in Boston.

The Columbia Journalism Review has announced it will launch a progam called the 'Encore Fellowship', a new initiative designed to give 'downsized professionals a writing position as well as support to help them choose how best to use their experience in the years ahead.'

The fellowship proposition comes in tough times for the news industry which has suffered major financial blows in advertising and subscription revenue due to the recession. The losses have forced many news organisations to rethink costs, make layoffs and even close their doors in some cases. As a result, it has been estimated that some 16,000 journalists were put out of work in 2008.

After receiving a generous grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies, CJR decided to put the money toward helping some of these journalists, choosing out-of-work senior reporters 'who have recently left their jobs because of the industry's economic condition, but who are not ready for traditional retirement,' to join the fellowship.

Laid-off L. A Times staff have been particularly pro-active in dealing with the current employment slump. They are selling their reporting, managing and creative talents on an online platform,the Journalism Shop. The site was developed by ex- Times reporter, Scott Martelle with tech specialist, Brett Levy.

The Shop offers links to the resumes and profiles of investigative reporters, page designers, project managers and book reviewers. The site acts as a match making service; if a searcher is unsure as to who he/she needs for a specific project, the Shop will point them in the right direction.
                                                                                                                                                                

The New York Times has been awarded the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism grand prize. Winners were announced by the Knight Foundation and J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University's School of Communications last Thursday, Editor & Publisher reported. Six innovations on the NYT's website contributed to its success in wining the $10,000 prize:

New York Times journalist Tim Arango has written about how shrinking newsrooms in the US have caused concern among lawyers fighting for the lives of prisoners on death row. When newsrooms were flourishing, lawyers would often offer case outlines to reporters who would then unearth evidence and pursue witnesses. This led to "a spate of exonerations" in which the work of journalists was key.

Now, many fewer cases are being followed by journalists, which means that lawyers have to do a lot more of the work themselves, and in some cases, it just does not get done. In particular, in the US, a "novel legal theory" exists that allows news organisations access to physical records and allows members of the press to appear as plaintiffs. Death penalty opponents fear that reduced newsroom resources will mean that newspapers will not be able to dedicate time and effort to locating DNA evidence to show that innocent people have been executed, for example.

The New York Times has launched a new photojournalism blog called Lens, to showcase "the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting." It is a home for photojournalism projects which might not appear in print, reported Editor & Publisher. The paper just won a Pulitzer Prize for photography.

Lens does not have a dedicated budget or staff, but will feature work done for the print edition including the Times' vast archives, personal projects by Times photographers, wire service photographs and work given free to the publication. It will also show multimedia projects by the paper's video department and still photographers. Staff photographer Josh Haner, one of the three employees assigned to produce the blog, told E & P that "we're pretty darn proud of it."

The comments adorning the bottom of online articles have become the norm in online news; for the most part, readers expect the right to comment and by and large publications allow them to have it. Intended as a means of criticism and communication between writers and their audience, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times asks what purpose the comment pages really serve.

Using op-ed columnist Anne Applebaum as her example, Heffernan points out that although Pulitzer prize winner Applebaum has been regarded as one of "the world's most sophisticated thinkers", the comments on her online articles (published on Slate and the Washington Post) often ridicule her opinions and insist she knows nothing. She explains that Applebaum is branded a fool by some commenters, patronisingly referred to as "sweetie" and "dear", and has even been subject to "anti-Semitic tirades".

As a mark of just how hard layoffs and cutbacks have hit some struggling US newspapers, Richard Perez-Peña writes that even "winning your profession's highest honor does not mean you get to keep your job, and neither does taking a bullet while at work." He follows the stories of two US journalists who have lost their jobs despite being involved in rather extraordinary stories.

Paul Giblin, a former East Valley Tribune writer was laid off in January, as was Patti Epler, a former editor at the publication. With a few of their colleagues, the two started the subscription and advertising funded online-only Arizona Guardian. The two won "a string of awards" for a project criticising a county sheriff, which they worked on together - topped off by winning a Pulitzer prize last week.

Following the announcement of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winners, Roy J. Harris Jr. continues the discussion about online journalism's part in the event. The opinion piece he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor expressed his thoughts on how journalism can "raise its standards" if they include online work. "That would once more elevate journalism - and elevate the Pulitzers, too. And it just might make old Joseph Pulitzer smile," he wrote.

In a televised Newshour interview this week, Jeffrey Brown follows up the Pulitzer Prizes with a discussion with media analysts Robert Rosenthal and Deborah Nelson about the future of investigative journalism. Many believe that quality in-depth investigative journalism seems to be threatened by the newspaper industry cutbacks and are searching for ways to save it.

Executive director at the Center for Investigative Reporting Robert Rosenthal shares what it takes to do good investigative reporting: talented, passionate journalists, usually with experience; often beat reporting, which means dedication to an issue or sector; and especially, time and commitment. He says that because editors are pressured to "feed the beast" and make cutbacks, they are cutting the highly paid investigative journalists and their time and resource-consuming stories.

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced - and, in the first year that online entrants have been accepted, an online winner has been selected in the national reporting category. The St Petersburg Times has been recognised for its PolitiFact project, the majority of which was published on PolitiFact.com. The recognition of the project displays the growing importance of online reporting in the modern news landscape.

It was the New York Times that emerged triumphant, however, picking up no fewer than five prizes across a range of categories - including international and breaking news reporting. There have only been two occasions where a publication has won more than five prizes, the NYT in 2002 and the Washington Post last year. Interestingly, neither the NYT nor any other publication, won any recognition for their coverage of the financial crisis.

In front of an audience of 40 people on Wednesday afternoon, new media came face to face with old media. Arianna Huffington, founder of the online only Huffington Post, and Pulitzer prize winning Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times journalist, met to discuss the differences between print and online journalism.

Greenhouse described a typical day at the beginning of her 30-year career at the NYT, where she used a typewriter and gave copy to her editors on carbon paper - a system which she now describes as a "dinosaur of a news operation". Speaking of her departure from the NYT, Greenhouse also revealed that being asked to do additional online-only reporting was one of the factors. She disliked the immediacy which has become integral to journalism, largely as a result of its online transition.

In the small Californian town of Point Reyes Station, a newspaper war that first started in 2007 may finally be coming to an end, if locals get their way.

PBS ventures FRONTLINE and FRONTLINE/World have launched an online investigation into international bribery in conjunction with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica. The site is called "The Business of Bribes."

Over the next ten weeks, the joint project will "investigate the global impact of bribery, including complex financial systems to hide payments, and the systematic corruption of high-ranking foreign officials that contributes to the destabilization of the developing world," according to its website. The series will feature video, documents and print reports, including in-depth interviews with middlemen, prosecutors, whistleblowers and former presidents.

Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene with a camera, it is extremely unlikely that they will be a member of a citizen photojournalism organisation. But has Citizenside, a small, young company based in Paris, found a solution? The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder Matthieu Stefani and editor-in-chief Aurélien Viers about Citizenside's work and the way they see the future of citizen photojournalism.

Citizenside operates in two different ways. On its own site, it functions in a similar way to other agencies: it gathers photos from its community - 35,000 members, close to 7,000 of which are active - which are published after thorough checking of the photos' validity. Staff receive 500-600 images a day, and those which pass the checking are categorised into sections such as headlines, showbiz, or unusual, or gathered into portfolios with others along the same theme or about the same event. Media outlets can purchase the photos from Citzenside, with up to 75% of the price going to the contributor. Agence France Presse owns a 34% stake of Citizenside, and is currently trialling incorporating the company's amateur images into its image forums, where any of the news agency's 7000 partners would be able to buy them. Content is clearly labelled as amateur, and Citizenside stressed the importance of differentiating the work of 'citizens' from that of professionals.

AFP is currently trialling incorporating Citizenside's amateur pictures into its image forums where any of its 7000 partners can buy them

Staff are proactive about finding images, "we don't just wait for people to send them," explained Stefani. Their kit allows them to locate users within a certain radius of any given spot, so if something happens which they want to know more about, they can send out an email requesting photos. "We send 3 or 4 of these a day," Stefani clarified. The company tries to avoid receiving photographs straight from mobile phones via MMS as the quality is poor and it is much harder to check an image's authenticity. Developers have however released an iPhone application, and are looking at launching similar products for Blackberry and  Google's Android phone. Staff also provide feedback when contributors send in images that cannot be used.

Mainstream Media success through factchecking

Citizenside photos have recently been on the cover of French daily Liberation, and in Le Point magazine and Le Figaro magazine, so the company is making a name for itself. The Liberation photo was of a snow storm, and Viers explained how a storm was a good example of an instance when citizen photo reporting really works: anybody can be a witness and as it might be harder to travel, professional photographers will not necessarily be able to cover the whole storm effectively. He added that Citizenside members were definitely not trying to play the role of reporters, rather they are "news witnesses."

One of the ways in which Citzenside differs from other sites that gather user photos and video, such as self-declared "unedited, unfiltered" CNN's iReport, is that all images are checked for authenticity. The company's developers have created a tool through which users can send photos, and which provides various details to staff about each photo or video that they receive, such as the camera brand and model, the resolution, and the date the photo was taken. Crucially, the programme can also alert staff to whether a photo has been modified online. Using the sender's IP address, the tool also shows from where in the world images have been sent. With this information, Citizenside staff can get a pretty good idea of whether what the contributor has told them about the image is indeed true. "I think at the moment, we are the only company who can offer such a specialised tool for the media," Viers remarked, and Stefani explained that developers would continue to refine the product to make it more and more effective. If staff still have doubts, particularly in the case of major, potentially controversial stories, they will contact the sender directly via telephone or email. "We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story," stressed Stefani. "If someone appears to be trying to mislead us, we will expel them from the community," he added.

"We will double check, triple check, quadruple check if it is a big story." 

This emphasis on checking the authenticity of the images significantly increases the value of Citizenside's service, as amateur content with no professional input can be relatively meaningless. Citizen journalism site The Observers offers a similar commitment to fact-checking, a trend which has the potential to bring citizen journalism closer to the mainstream media in terms of respectability. Stefani asserted that he believes it is the company's focus on "quality not quantity" which makes their service so appealing to clients.  "We don't believe in the idea that everybody is a journalist, just because they have a camera and a blog," underlined Viers. Rather what he believes works is a form of professional-amateur collaboration: "an association of bloggers, witnesses, journalists and editors."

A global citizen photo network?

The most crucial difference of Citizenside, however, is its mission to share its technology. Stefani explained that he and the other Citizenside founders quite quickly understood that, as Kyle MacRae pointed out, one agency alone will never be able to get an image from every breaking story. But what if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? This is what Citizenside is aiming to do by offering its 'Reporter Kit' to traditional publications, sold via AFP. The tool was released in September 2008 and the first client to purchase it was Voici, a French gossip magazine. Citizenside is about to launch the same service for Public, one of Voici's rivals and is also in talks with one of France's biggest daily newspapers, a couple of regionals and one UK paper. The Voici community allows readers of the magazine to upload their images to the site, and if Voici decides to use them in its print magazine or on its main website, then it will pay the contributor, and Citizenside takes commission. If Voici would like to sell an image to another outlet, then Citizenside retains exclusive resell rights, and the profit will be split equally between Citizenside, the magazine and the contributor. Recently, for example, a video showing Hollywood star Lindsey Lohan being showered with flour by animal activists on her way into a Parisian club was sold to US TV channel Extra TV for a considerable sum. Stefani described how he plans for Citizenside's income to be based largely on this reselling of content, rather than on sale of the technology itself. Incidentally, a years' use of the Reporter Kit tool would start at about 13,000 euros, moving to upwards of 20,000 for premium tools and tailor-made development.

What if many different publications all over the world each hosted their own UGC community that was managed by Citizenside? 

Citizenside hopes to make the checking process easier and easier for its clients, for instance by developing a system which would make automatically judge an image's authenticity based on different variables and display a red or green light. Viers stressed that he sees citizen contributions as essential in today's media environment, if news organisations "ignore UGC they are going to make mistakes, and they are going to miss opportunities." Stefani explained that "we had a hard time being understood at first because journalists would just see us as competitors." But he insisted that rather than a competitor, Citizenside aims to be "a new tool, a new source of information." They believe that particularly in a local context, such a community could be extremely valuable to their clients, who would be able to forge better relations with readers, and provide a greater level of coverage. Viers pointed out that hyperlocal news is often incredibly important to people, and it gives citizen witnesses a real chance to flourish.

Dollars for amateurs

So Citizenside believes it has found the solution to the problems raised by Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae. Stefani brought up the example of the man with the first Hudson plane crash photo previously cited by MacRae, who argued that it was the man's instinct to share the photo rather than sell it, and that he was very unlikely to have heard of a citizen photojournalism project that would help him sell it. If Citizenside achieves its goal of establishing popular image sharing community sites for major newspapers, then in the future, a similar witness to an event may well think of sending such a photo to their favourite newspaper, where it would be shared amongst the community, but could also be sold for a significant amount of cash. The project has a great of deal of potential. Obviously, the company is still very small and is yet to break international barriers, though they hope to soon. Stefani admitted that they will need a cash injection if they are to expand beyond Europe into Asian or American markets. There is likely to be some resistance from more traditional media operations to the inclusion of amateur content in their publications, and it might take time to change mindsets.

But the current economic downturn could in fact benefit the rise of citizen journalism as news organisations look for cheaper ways to obtain coverage of events. Editor and Publisher recently ran a story on World Press Photo and Pulitzer prize winning photographer Anthony Suau, who is currently struggling to find work because media outlets do not have enough money to pay him. Using photos from readers is undoubtedly cheaper than employing prize-winning professional. Citizen photojournalism does make sense, if there is a way to prove that the photos are real. A reporter can write a story from afar, but you cannot take a photo from afar. And although many photos will not be of the quality of those taken by experienced photojournalists, professionals cannot be everywhere at once, and taking advantage of the camera-armed public is definitely better than nothing.

Photo credits: Laure Bernard