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Introduction
- University of Missouri Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Filling a Black Hole Weclining readership, daunting Internet challenges, and flagging profitability get most of the blame for what ails today’s American newspaper business. Some lovers of the print medium, though, see another affliction within the fifteen hundred dailies that survived the last century’s industry consolidation. These readers lament the steady rise in numbers of what people commonly call “once-great newspapers .” A sickness of the soul—and a bit of amnesia about the newspaper’s societal role—underlies that phenomenon. Pleading poverty, but acting with editorial timidity, some publishers forgo devoting precious resources to public-service projects , confronting serious community plagues, or even pursuing basic reader concerns through daily beat coverage. Such work cannot be done with papers on lifesupport , managements may argue. When budgets are cut, though, these same publications often target the senior journalists most able to do meaningful and inspirational work, worsening the crisis. Greatness survives, and even thrives, in hundreds of newspaper oases around the country, of course. That’s why competition still heats up early each year for journalism’s Pulitzer Prizes, especially the most coveted prize of all: the Public Service Gold Medal. What kind of work attains the rarefied distinction of Pulitzer Gold Medal winner ? Journalism that reveals an unacceptably high number of police shootings of civilians and helps reverse the trend, as a Washington Post team did to earn the honor in . Or that blows the whistle on racism infecting a federal agency, as Portland ’s Oregonian, the winner, did in its investigation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Journalists may be honored for opening our eyes to a scan- dal involving Catholic priests who were sexual predators and the Church’s equally shocking cover-up—the Boston Globe’s claim to the prize. Or for employing every ounce of a battered newspaper’s strength to help communities recover from a hurricane, as was the case with the Sun Herald in Gulfport, Mississippi, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans during the devastating summer of Katrina .The NewYorkTimes earned a prize for creating “A Nation Challenged,” a daily section that included “Portraits of Grief,” which gave New Yorkers tools for coping with the September attacks and their aftermath. The dramatic contributions to the public welfare continued with the Gold Medal, awarded to the Wall Street Journal for disclosing how companies had secretly and improperly backdated the stock-purchase options they had granted to their executives. The Journal ’s team of four reporters—one of them a recent Yale University math major—developed its own algorithm to measure the most egregious cases. In the scandal’s wake, at least seventy executives lost their jobs and the federal government launched investigations at more than companies. This kind of public service may pay off in higher newsstand sales or additional advertising dollars. Or it may not. Sometimes the business side actually suffers from outstanding journalism, at least in the short term. The Fort Worth StarTelegram won its Gold Medal for investigating a design flaw that led to a slew of fatal Bell Helicopter crashes—coverage that sparked Bell, the area’s largest employer , to boycott the paper. For Little Rock’s Arkansas Gazette, balanced coverage of school integration won it the Public Service Pulitzer in , but cost it dearly in readers. And in the case of Ohio’s Canton Daily News, honored in , exposure of politically connected local thugs led first to the editor’s murder and then the paper’s closure. If today’s reporters and editors don’t know much about these important moments in U.S. journalism history, it is perhaps symptomatic of the industry’s spiritual ailment. Bill Blundell, who travels from paper to paper as one of the country’s top writing coaches, sees the malady as “a black hole that exists at the heart of our business : the nearly universal failure of newspaper staffs to learn from the past, including the past of the very newspapers they may be working for at the moment.” The hole is especially gaping in the case of public service, where so little work has been done to expose today’s journalists to the best projects that have been done in that field. Why hasn’t a book on Pulitzer Gold Medal winners been written before? After all, Pulitzer-winning photography, feature writing, editorials, and cartoons all have their own books. For one thing, newspapers earning the Public Service Prize often [3.139.233.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...
