PrintThe winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, newspaper journalism’s highest honors, will be announced at Columbia on Monday. Almost a century after the prizes were founded, the world of newspaper journalism is in turmoil as papers nationwide struggle to stay afloat. This week, The Eye sits down with Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers, to see how the awards are adapting to the changing media landscape. We also speak with Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs at the Journalism School, to find out why anyone would want to go to the J-school at a time like this.
Sig Gissler
The administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Gissler serves on the 19-member Pulitzer board, helps assemble the juries that sift through the initial entries, and acts as the public face of the prizes.
The Eye: So I don’t embarrass myself: How exactly do you pronounce the name of these prizes?
SG: PULLitser. PULL-it-ser. Some people call it “PYULitser,” but we consider that incorrect.
Eye: What is the relationship between the Pulitzer Prizes and the Journalism School?
SG: We’re headquartered here in the Journalism School. We have our own budget, our own operation, and what we have is a very warm and effective relationship with the Journalism School. We use some of their rooms, for example, for our jury meetings. At the same time, we provide ... what we call Pulitzer Traveling Fellowships for five journalism graduates each year. So there’s a symbiotic relationship between the prizes and the Journalism School.
Eye: What’s the volume of submissions like?
SG: Well, this year we got 1,167 books submitted, and in five categories: history, biography, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. About 164 music entries that went to the music jury. We had about 50 or 60 plays. We had over 1,000 journalism entries in 14 categories. So it’s a lot of material that gets moved through here. Some of the books are door-stoppers, you know, they’re six-, seven-, eight-hundred-page books. Many of the journalism entries—for most of our categories you can submit 10 exhibits in each entry. For our Public Service Prize you can submit 20 exhibits, and for our Feature Writing Prize you can submit five. And each one of these exhibits can be quite extensive, so more than 1,000 entries will have many moving parts to them.
Eye: Can you describe the typical juror?
SG: Well it depends. In the journalism juries, most of them are journalists, or journalism professors. The majority are editors. But we also try to work in some reporters, particularly previous Pulitzer Prize winners, people who are performing at a very high level in the profession. In the book categories, we probably are more diverse. We go for book editors, we go for academics, sometimes just authors. So we have quite a wide collection of people.
Eye: How are the prizes changing as journalism changes?
SG: The Pulitzer Prizes are a living organism. It changes through the years. Originally, we didn’t have a poetry prize, we didn’t have a photography prize. These things were added as time went on. It’s an ever-evolving, developing competition. In more recent times, one of the things that the Pulitzer Prizes have done in terms of journalism is to expand its scope to include more online material. We began in 1999 by allowing online material by newspapers in the public service category. ... Then in 2005 we expanded this to cover all categories. You could submit online material on newspaper Web sites. We expanded that into all forms of online material. Interactive graphics to videos could be submitted in all the categories with the exception of photography, a category we still restrict to still images. ... This year, we expanded it further to cover online-only news organizations that publish regularly, that are primarily devoted to original news reporting and continuing coverage of events. And so now in our competition, we have entries from online-only publications for the first time.
Eye: Currently, there are no prizes awarded specifically for multimedia content. Might that change in the future?
SG: I don’t want to speculate about what categories we might alter, but at this point, what we’re encouraging entrants to do is to blend the online components with the text components, which is really where journalism is today. It’s this hybrid of text and images and graphics. I think that’s one of the strengths of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism right now. They reflect the nature of journalism today. Other competitions have separate silos: They put the print material in one silo, and they put the online material in another silo. I don’t think that’s the way journalism is evolving.
Eye: What’s the significance of the Pulitzer Prizes?
SG: Well, they’re very important. The joke has always been that when you win a Pulitzer Prize, the first line of your obituary has been written. ... And I think that is true. It reflects the high regard that the prizes have and have achieved through the decades. And I think one of the reasons that they’re highly prized is that it’s a very careful judging process. ... The other thing that I think sets them apart is this blend of arts and journalism. So when you’re a journalist and you win a Pulitzer Prize for, say, explanatory reporting, you’ll be in the same room as maybe a great author who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Some of our board members have said that when you win a Pulitzer Prize, you enter an aristocracy of excellence.
Eye: The prizes were created to honor excellence in newspaper journalism. If newspapers become less prominent, do the prizes have a future?
SG: I think they do, because they’re evolving with the changing media. What the exact makeup of the newspaper industry will be, who knows. But the way the industry’s going right now is that the journalism is as good, if not better, than it’s ever been. ... The big problem today is not the journalism. It’s generating the revenue to support the journalism as the industry goes through a transition. When we announce the prizes on Monday, I think that anyone who looks at the nominees will be struck by the high quality of journalism that’s being practiced all across this great continental country. We have a long way to go before we think that the newspaper industry is kaput.
Eye: And finally, I suppose you can’t give us any hints about the announcements on Monday.
SG: I could, but I’d have to throw you out the window.
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Bill Grueskin
The dean of academic affairs at the Journalism School, Grueskin oversees its faculty and curriculum. He started in September after 13 years at the Wall Street Journal.
Eye: What attracted you to the Journalism School?
BG: It’s something I saw as a way to address a lot of the issues that journalism is dealing with from a broader perspective, rather than within the framework of a single news organization.
Eye: So you almost have a personal mission to change the face of journalism.
BG: Well I think that’s a little grandiose (laughs). I wouldn’t quite put it that way. I want to be involved in how journalism adapts and transforms itself in a really convulsive time, but I don’t see myself as the one who’s going to find all the answers.
Eye: How can the school keep pace with an industry in flux?
BG: That’s a good question, and is something that we grapple with every day here. The industry is undergoing tremendous dislocation right now, more on the economic front. On the other hand, in terms of the way content gets distributed and the way that you see really interesting, imaginative ways of creating journalism that didn’t exist five years ago, much less 10 or 20 years ago, it’s dramatically different. So what the school is doing is continuing to impart the core values and skills that we feel confident are going to survive this disruption in the economic model, but also re-tailor the curriculum so it’s more relevant to a lot of the issues that are going on in the industry today.
Eye: As journalism changes, do the skills you teach change?
BG: Some of the skills are kind of timeless: objectivity, integrity, understanding what is a story, understanding how you treat sources, understanding how you evaluate information, how you analyze it, how you present it in ways that readers or viewers or listeners want to get it. ... Then there is a set of skills that we increasingly need to teach our students that will help them when they immediately graduate from here. In the old days, the only technological skill that journalists really needed was to be able to type 25 to 30 words a minute. ... That’s less and less true these days. At the same time, I’m really cognizant of the fact that the technological skills that we teach in 2009 may be obsolete in three years. So what I really want them to leave here having is more of an intellectual curiosity and a flexibility about technology and how it affects journalism and how they can incorporate it into their lives as journalists, and then they’ll be prepared to deal with lots of things that we can’t possibly predict sitting here in April 2009.
Eye: You’re altering the curriculum in August. What changes can we expect?
BG: Well, the main ones are to RW1 [Reporting and Writing 1], which is the kind of core Journalism 101 course that all the M.S. students take. We will have a heavier dose of digital skills training up-front in August, and then when the semester officially begins after Labor Day, the class will occupy more of the students’ time for the first five weeks of the semester. ... So they’ll get eight weeks of core training, both in foundational journalism skills as well as digital skills, and they’ll be taught in a much more integrated way. We think that will lead to a better sense of the impact that the Web has on what a journalist does and a better understanding of how when you write for the Web, or when you produce for the Web, it changes the way you go about conceptualizing a story.
We’re also going to mandate a business and media course for all the M.S. students. That’s the first time that’s ever happened, so they’ll understand more about the kind of core business models driving the way decisions are getting made. And we’re retooling the law, ethics, and history courses—particularly the law and ethics courses—so they will take into account the reality of the situation, which is increasingly that students leave here not going into big, mainstream media situations that have layers and layers of editors and lawyers that act to stop journalists from making a mistake, but in fact are going to much smaller news organizations or in many cases they’re going to work for a very small Web site or completely on their own, and they need to be much better-equipped to handle some of the legal and ethical issues. They’re not going to have the institutional and historical knowledge that’s generally been associated with their first journalism job out of school.
Eye: I’m sure you saw an article that ran about a month ago in New York Magazine that quoted Ari Goldman, who teaches Reporting and Writing 1, saying “Fuck new media” and that new media training amounted to “playing with toys.” Are dissenting voices like Goldman’s welcome in this school?
BG: First of all, let me say that professor Goldman is an incredibly talented and highly respected teacher, not just by his fellow faculty members, but by the students. Having seen a lot of his student evaluations I can attest to that pretty firmly. The actual context of the quote was that a student needed to attend a new media workshop in the middle of RW1, and so he was speaking more specifically about the student wanting to leave class in order to do that rather than about his overall attitude. Actually, if you look at the Web site that his religion class did on their trip to Ireland about a month ago, it’s a fairly dynamic site that in many ways takes advantage of the Web. You know, all that said, yes, there are clearly—you know, some of what is happening at the school mirrors what’s happening in the industry... I think one of the issues that we’re facing is that everybody, both inside and outside academia, has very different ideas about where journalism is going and what it’s going to look like five or 10 or 15 years from now. So a lot of this is just what you’d expect in the context of a graduate school that’s preparing students for an industry that’s in a tremendous amount of flux.
Eye: I went to a journalism conference recently, and several of the speakers at the conference warned the audience not to go to journalism school. They said that putting yourself $50,000 in debt just isn’t a smart career move when there are no guaranteed jobs. What would you say to these critics?
BG: I think first of all, that journalism schools have never been like business schools, where there’s been a fairly precise relationship between the investment you put into business school and the income you expect in five or 10 years after graduation. People do it because they want to become journalists, not because after a year of journalism school you can become far wealthier than you could have ever anticipated. So that’s the first issue. The second issue is that a lot of what you needed to know to be a journalist five or 10 years ago was taught in the context of the traditional newsroom. There were lots of editors, there were lots of people with institutional knowledge and that kind of thing. What you need now is all that plus the new skills that readers expect, and the truth is that a lot of newsrooms aren’t well-equipped to teach you that. I certainly wouldn’t make the argument that you can’t be a successful journalist without going to journalism school, but I actually think that the reasons for going are probably more compelling now than they would have been five or 10 years ago.
As newsrooms cut back more and more, the number of people who are available to teach you those things is dwindling. So in most newsrooms there are far fewer editors than there used to be. When I was at the Miami Herald, for example, we used to have editors who would sit and work with young reporters the way that our faculty, frankly, do. They’d sit with them every day of the story, rewrite it top to bottom, and really show them how to do it. I can tell that the Miami Herald doesn’t have editors able to do that anymore. So it will be harder—not impossible, but harder—to learn that in the context of a traditional news organization.
Eye: I’ve read that applications to the J-School have increased 40 percent this year. Why do you think that is?
BG: Well, I think there are a few factors. The first one is that any time there’s an economic downturn, applications for graduate school tend to go up because there’s not as much opportunity cost. By that I mean that you don’t have to give up a great job to go to grad school. ... But I also think that a lot of prospective students realize that in a tumultuous time like this, when job opportunities may be dwindling, opportunities to help create new forms of journalism, and new models to support it, are increasing. When I entered this business, there was a fairly well-set number of outlets, and it was pretty clear what you had to do: You had to work at a small paper, then at a medium paper, then, if you were lucky and pretty good, you got to a national paper, which is what most people aspired to—though certainly not everybody. Now, it’s not really clear what the rules are.
Eye: Finally, how are you feeling these days about the future of journalism? Gloomy? Optimistic?
BG: There’s a tendency among journalists to wax overly nostalgic about the good old days. The truth is that newspapers have been having problems for 15 or 20 years, it’s just that they had a monopoly ... in most of their markets, so it was kind of covered up. Insofar as it’ll make journalists start doing more journalism that’s really relevant to readers’ lives and that really makes an impact, then I think that it’s a really good thing. But that’s not to minimize the amount of heartache and pain that a lot of people are feeling right now.