Prize for Best Performance in a Declining Industry Goes To...

Lots of interesting debate about this week's Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that "the newspapers' Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet."

Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review -- a bastion of old-guard journalism -- proudly points out that the Pulitzers celebrate the power of investigative journalism. Here on Portfolio.com, my colleague Zubin Jelveh argues that Pulitzers raise circulation and thus are good. He winds up noting that "USA Today is an interesting counter example. This is one big news organization that doesn't seem to be Pulitzer-obsessed." In fact, it never one won.

I just want to point out that from my particular point of view, the Pulitzers seem completely disconnected from what works with readers in journalism. I was at USA Today for 22 years. We didn't "chase" Pulitzers, but we certainly desired them. The paper nominated my columns a few times. It nominated exceptional pieces by very talented colleagues many, many times. The journalism establishment judging the prizes never gave USA Today the nod to win. (If you're snickering, you haven't paid attention to USA Today -- stories by people like Susan Page or this one by Blake Morrison's team.)

In the meantime, USA Today was the single most successful American newspaper of the past 25 years. It grew from nothing into the nation's largest circulation paper. It has lost less circulation in the Internet age than most daily papers. Only lately has it run into the same headwinds that have hurt most other newspapers. None of that matters to the Pulitzer judges. In fact, USA Today's success seemed to create a bias against it.

Serious journalism has an important place in the American system. Yet most Pulitzer-seeking, five-part series on stuff like mismanagement of contracts in a mid-size city's school construction are just not selling newspapers. I don't buy Zubin's contention that Pulitzers are good business. They reward a dying art form, which is both good and bad -- it is helping save a significant art form, but also encourages more of it even though it's bad for the institutions that fund and support the art form.

It all gets complicated. But in the end, the Pulitzers seem to be becoming less relevant, and more like a bunch of insiders congratulating themselves on the exquisite engineering inside the Titanic. It's not what matters when the iceberg lies ahead.

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