Convergence landmark: Pulitzer Prize
The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service award for articles detailing deaths and injuries among American workers and showing how employers broke basic safety rules with impunity. The Times got the Pulitzer, but it should be noted that this was part of a massive convergence effort with the CBC and PBS Frontline.
This is the first time a major convergence project has won a Pulitzer Prize, according to CyberJournalist.net's research.
Timed with the publication of newspaper stories, Frontline aired a television documentary produced in conjunction with The Times' articles will be broadcast on "Frontline" tomorrow (PBS, 9 p.m. in most cities). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program, "The Fifth Estate," also aired a related show.
Frontline's "A Dangerous Business" package links to documents, the transcript from the Frontline documentary on McWane Inc., an excerpt from the book, A Job to Die For, and more.
CBC News' "A Toxic Company" is a companion Website to the Fifth Estate documentary examining McWane, Inc.
The Times' effort also included an impressive online component. In the multimedia feature "When Workers Die," writer David Barstow narrates slide shows exploring victims of the system, California's pursuit of safety violators and a look at OSHA's hesistance to act. In the three-part multimedia feature "Dangerous Business," The Times uses narrated slide shows from victims, audio from Times' reporters and video from Frontline to explore the workplaces to regulation. And Barstow and reporter Lowell Bergman also answered readers' questions in a forum.
Although the Public Service category is the only one that accepts online components as part of entries, the Web components were not part of the winning entry in this case, according to Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler. This is because the submission was originally made in the investigative reporting category, where it was a finalist, and moved to the Public Service category by the board that administers the awards on behalf of Columbia University.
Still, the work online is as good as anything The Times did in print, enhances the story -- and is certainly Pulitzer-worthy. It's about time the Pulitzer committee opened up all of the entry categories to online components.
Apr 05, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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