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Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious prizes in journalism reflected the changing face of the field itself.
On Monday afternoon, the 108th edition of the Pulitzer Prizes was announced. In some ways, the winners and finalists were familiar: important investigations, incisive commentary, tremendous photography. But the list of honorees also highlighted three major ongoing shifts in American journalism:
- The best works of journalism are increasingly produced by just a few high-end institutions.
- The decline in local and regional newspapers has pushed online-native outlets to the forefront.
- The work historically performed by newspapers is increasingly done by other forms of media.
To state the obvious: Duh. None of those is a flashy new trend for 2024; they’ve each been in progress for at least two decades. But we’ve never seen a Pulitzers announcement like yesterday, when more online-native outlets (12) were honored than newspapers (8).
The Pulitzers are an annual opportunity for journalism to reflect on its best work — and who is producing it. Between my years in newspapers and here at Nieman Lab, I’ve now seen 27 Pulitzer announcement cycles — and this year’s batch of honorees is different.
The Pulitzer Prizes were, for decades, meant to honor the best in journalism as produced by American newspapers and wire services. Radio, TV, and magazines all had their own prestigious awards to battle over; the Pulitzers were for print.
But the arrival of the internet flattened out media formats and pushed a series of Pulitzer boards to broaden the prizes’ boundaries over time. In the 2009 prizes, online-only outlets were allowed to enter for the first time. In 2015, magazines were let in.1 In 2020, the debut of a new Audio Reporting prize gave radio outlets a foot in the door. And for this year’s prizes, all TV and broadcast outlets were allowed in.2
In the years that have followed, non-newspaper outlets have made substantial gains in certain categories — Audio Reporting, obviously, but also Feature Writing, which magazines have come to dominate. But despite online-only news orgs having been eligible for...