Congrats to the Chronicle, 2009 Pulitzer finalist
Congratulations are due for the Chronicle (and current and former staff ), honored today as a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of Hurricane Ike.
The Chronicle proved unable to duplicate the success of the nearby Times-Picayune, which captured the Pulitzer in the breaking news category in 2006 for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, the New York Times took the top prize in the category this year, for its Spitzer coverage. Still, it's a big deal being named finalist, and it's especially nice to see the recognition of a stellar team effort during a crisis.
And now... a question (or several) for diminutive editor Jeff Cohen. Would it be possible, finally, for the newspaper to stop looking to a prize board for validation? To stop trying to get their attention with death-penalty journalism so skewed as to be a caricature? With environmental gotcha activism by a journalist who left town fairly quickly when the prize didn't materialize? With a cartoonist who won the Prize at another newspaper trying just a little too hard here?
Your community news coverage/analysis of Ike was Pulitzer finalist quality (and if the newspaper's past coverage of Enron or Stanford Financial had been so strong, that prized Pulitzer surely would have been captured). Why can't the newspaper focus like a laser on local/regional affairs all the time, instead of just during a crisis?
Granted, that's made more difficult now with all the layoffs and the lack of emphasis on local/regional news, reported by professional journalists (reflected by a glance at Chron.com's disjointed main page, by this strange sister site, and really the absence of any serious effort to communicate the newspaper's vision to the public moving forward). But if the Atlanta Journal-Constitution can re-evaluate itself from top to bottom after its own downsizing, engage with its readers, and remake itself as a news and editorial organization, why couldn't our Pulitzer-finalist newspaper? Who knows, owning the local/regional news space and re-engaging the entire customer base (even those in the center and rightward!) might eventually lead to that elusive Pulitzer -- or at the very least, a healthier bottom line (just in case a proprietary electronic news reader isn't quite the salvation promised by the Hearst suits).
Darrell Hancock and Cory Crow have written more -- and more thoughtfully -- on this topic, so go check out their stuff and leave them some comments.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/20/09 11:13 PM | Print | Comments (3)
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