Five elite news outlets now win two-fifths of all Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, dominating a contest that once favored extraordinary reporting in provincial newspapers across the country.
Journalism’s top prize is increasingly a contest among a few national brands, especially The New York Times and Washington Post. Each paper captured two Pulitzers in the 2023 contest, the results of which were announced this week.
The Pulitzer imbalance matters, media scholars say, and not just for journalists. The relative scarcity of long-form journalism, the depth of coverage the Pulitzers recognize, outside New York and Washington, D.C., symptomizes a larger societal problem: A vast news desert now blankets much of the nation.
“The Pulitzer is kind of the peacock in the coalmine,” said Frank Sesno, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and director of strategic initiatives at the George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs. “It reveals both the nationalization of news in this country and the greatest gap and weakness in news, which is now at the local and regional level.”
The full article can be found in The Hill.