Five elite news outfits win two-fifths of all Pulitzer Prizes
Five elite news outlets now win two-fifths of all Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, dominating a contest that once favored extraordinary reporting in provincial newspapers across the country.
Journalism’s top prize is increasingly a contest among a few national brands, especially The New York Times and Washington Post. Each paper captured two Pulitzers in the 2023 contest, the results of which were announced this week.
The Pulitzer imbalance matters, media scholars say, and not just for journalists. The relative scarcity of long-form journalism, the depth of coverage the Pulitzers recognize, outside New York and Washington, D.C., symptomizes a larger societal problem: A vast news desert now blankets much of the nation.
“The Pulitzer is kind of the peacock in the coalmine,” said Frank Sesno, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and director of strategic initiatives at the George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs. “It reveals both the nationalization of news in this country and the greatest gap and weakness in news, which is now at the local and regional level.”
Newspapers are closing at a rate of more than two a week, according to The State of Local News 2022, a report from Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school. The nation has lost at least 2,500 papers since 2005.
Newsroom employment nationwide dropped from 375,000 in 2006 to 104,000 in 2021. Gannett, America’s largest newspaper chain, eliminated more than half of its U.S. workforce in a four-year span, according to a report from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.
“The staffs have been completely hollowed out,” Sesno said. “I’ve talked to mayors and governors who say, ‘I don’t see reporters anymore.’”
The newspaper itself, that bundle of newsprint that once landed on America’s driveways and porches with a concussive thud, is endangered, if not quite extinct.
Only nine U.S. newspapers now report average daily print circulations of more than 100,000. Fifteen years ago, by contrast, the top three papers all had circulations over 1 million.
“The loss of American news is an American tragedy,” said Margot Susca, assistant professor of journalism, accountability and democracy in the School of Communication at American University. “Local newsrooms are fighting to exist. So you can forget about submitting for top awards when you are doing the work of three or four reporters.”
The decline of local journalism resonates in the annual Pulitzer ritual, whose results can be read as a diary of diminishing fortunes in provincial newsrooms.
In 1985, the midpoint in a prosperous decade for local newspapers, the Pulitzers rewarded an impressive array of regional operations: the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram, for revealing a fatal design flaw in Army helicopters; the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Va., for exposing corruption in City Hall; the St. Petersburg Times in Florida; the Philadelphia Inquirer; the Baltimore Evening Sun; the Macon Telegraph and News in Georgia; the Des Moines Register; and the Boston Globe, among others. Neither The New York Times nor Washington Post reaped any of the 14 journalism awards.
This year, by contrast, 7 of 15 Pulitzers in journalism went to four national brands: The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press.
Since 2000, those four outlets and a fifth, Reuters, have collectively claimed about six Pulitzers a year, on average, according to prize results tabulated by The Hill.
The same five operations earned roughly three Pulitzers per year in the 1980s, an era when dozens of large and well-funded newspapers could compete with them.
Mergers and bankruptcies cloud the statistical comparison: The British Reuters news agency, for example, wasn’t much of a Pulitzer player until its 2008 acquisition by Thomson Corporation of Canada, which yielded a larger operation. Some Pulitzer-winners of the Reagan era have shuttered. Innovative nonprofits have risen up to replace them.
“Inside Climate News wasn’t on that list 25 years ago,” Susca said, alluding to the nonprofit newsroom that won a Pulitzer for national reporting in 2013. “ProPublica wasn’t on that list 25 years ago.” ProPublica, an investigative nonprofit launched in 2007, has claimed six Pulitzers.
The recognition of regional journalism powerhouses, meanwhile, has declined. The Times once competed fiercely with outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer. All three still compete, but their Pulitzers are fewer and farther between.
American journalism has evolved into a kingdom ruled by national brands. The Times and Post and the wire services sweep in to cover local stories in the hinterlands, propelling them from provincial anonymity into the national news cycle.
In 2020, the Post became a Pulitzer finalist, an honor not far below a Pulitzer, with a series of articles about mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, events presumably covered with equal vigor by the depleted staffs of the El Paso Times and Dayton Daily News.
Sometimes, a story doesn’t register as a story until the Times or Post has weighed in. A tiny paper on Long Island uncovered the problematic past of Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican, months before The Times put it on the nation’s front pages. And the journalistic injustice didn’t fully register until the Post reported it.
When headline news strikes in the heartland, local papers mobilize their skeleton staffs and do their best to match the out-of-town titans. Pulitzer judges often reward them for their efforts, making the breaking news and local reporting categories lingering beacons of hope for local news.
“Huge events that happen in your area increase the possibility of winning something,” said Roy Harris Jr., a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of the book “Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism.”
“If you have a couple of great reporters and you put them in Uvalde,” the site of a 2022 mass shooting, “you have a pretty good chance of winning something, even if you’re not the Washington Post.”
At least two Texas papers, the Austin American-Statesman and Houston Chronicle, assembled strong Pulitzer entries with their Uvalde coverage. Both were honored as finalists. Neither won.
But two nontraditional journalism organizations did earn Pulitzers this year in the local reporting category. One is AL.com, the digital vestige of local papers that have ceased print publication. The other is Mississippi Today, one of hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms launched around the country to supplant news no longer provided by for-profit newspapers.
The Pulitzer in editorial writing went to a traditional news organization, the Miami Herald, that has survived decades of cuts.
“It’s not about the size of the organization,” said Amy Driscoll, author of the winning articles. “It’s about the heart of the reporters and the editors.”
Driscoll said she senses contest judges “try to spread the Pulitzers around.”
In a prepared statement, the Pulitzers organization seemed to concur: “Although the economics of journalism have undoubtedly shifted over the past three decades, the Pulitzer organization remains committed to a big-tent approach across American journalism.”
Stewards of the annual award, administered by Columbia University, have taken dramatic steps to answer those economic shifts. In 2009, the Pulitzer Board added online-only publications to the contest.
A few years later, it added magazines. That move put the Times and Post in competition with The New Yorker and Atlantic in categories such as feature-writing, where they had enjoyed a particular advantage because they published two of the nation’s last remaining Sunday magazines.
Despite those measures, the enduring Pulitzer supremacy of the Times and its peers can breed acrimony in the journalism world when they beat out smaller rivals.
The Washington Post earned a Pulitzer this year for “unflinching reporting that captured the complex consequences of life after Roe v. Wade,” the landmark abortion ruling whose dismantlement by the Supreme Court ranked as the political story of the year.
But it was Politico, the politics and policy publication, that had broken the story of Roe’s demise weeks earlier, with exclusive reporting on a leaked draft opinion. Politico did not win a Pulitzer.
In a well-circulated tweet, John Bresnahan, co-founder of Punchbowl News, termed the snub “a travesty.”
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