Frank Ahrens: After our big Pulitzer win on Monday, there was some melancholy around the newsroom along the lines of, "Oh, this will be the last year this kind of thing will happen."
I said just the opposite.
I bet the Big Three -- us, the Times and the Journal -- will most likely increase our dominance of the Pulitzers in coming years. Why? Because it's the mid-sized papers that have been/will be so hard-hit by cuts they will no longer be able to produce Pulitzer-caliber journalism.
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Your small papers will still win the occasional Pulitzer for some heroic two-person series on a coke-sniffing mayor, or when the local nuke plant goes critical, but I'm guessing they had pretty much the same staff levels in 1980 as they have now. Indeed, given that small and community newspapers are the only ones showing a revenue increase in our industry, they might actually have better resources now than they had then.
It's the Charlotte Observers, the Miami Heralds, the Lexington Herald-Leaders (and, given their immense debt, perhaps the L.A. Timeses and Chicago Tribunes) that were able to win Pulitzers in the past that will have little shot from now on. Without financial diversity, without being part of a global media empire, papers of that size will have to make even more draconian cuts, preventing them from producing the sort of long-term projects that usually win Pulitzers.
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