It’s time to reinvent the Pulitzer Prizes for this media age

When newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer willed a fortune to Columbia University before his death in 1911, journalism was a vastly different profession than it is today.

Most associations like the American Society of Newspaper Editors and academic institutions that teach journalism — fixtures that professionalized the practice of newsgathering — were established later in the 20th century. Pulitzer’s prizes landed in a field largely devoid of professional recognition beyond the status accorded with a larger publication, a Sunday column or a higher salary. They were a signpost for an American enterprise growing out of adolescence.

A century later, that adolescent is now in the throes of a mid-life crisis. The prizes are celebrating their hundredth birthday this year as the digital revolution continues to yank the commercial rug out from under America’s newspapers. Tech companies like Facebook and Google now serve as the primary intermediaries between journalists and their audiences, wresting the power of publication and distribution away from news organizations.

Although legacy companies and investors are pouring capital into digital upstarts, that’s no guarantor of their ultimate success. Meanwhile, the disruption shows no sign of letting up. If anything, it’s only accelerating.

So, what’s to become of the Pulitzer Prizes? They loom large in the popular imagination as representing the best of an industry under extreme financial duress. As they did at their inception, the prizes have the capability to define the profession of journalism as it undergoes massive transformation. But to do so will require creative thinking from an institution that for most of its existence has remained rooted in its tree-and-ink heritage.

To be sure, the prizes have made an effort to become more ecumenical in the last two decades. In 1997, on the 150th anniversary of Pulitzer’s birth, the contest put forth revised guidelines that allowed newspapers to submit online presentations as supplements to the public service category.

Several digitally minded innovations followed: In 2009, the Pulitzers opened to online-only news organizations; 2011 saw the investigative nonprofit ProPublica win a Pulitzer, the first online-only organization to do so; beginning in 2014, the prizes began allowing submissions from online and print magazines in select categories. These are, as Pulitzer Prize administrator Mike Pride noted, a laudable effort to keep pace with the rapidly changing profession the prizes celebrate.

In that spirit, here are several other ideas the prizes could put into place to ensure they stay relevant for future generations of digital journalists.

Today’s fraught media landscape makes the legacy and preservation of these prizes more important than ever, despite grousing from critics. There are those who say journalism prizes are a self-congratulatory exercise that serve to inflate egos and spawn newsroom stars who write with visions of Lucite tchotchkes in their heads. They say it’s unbecoming of journalists to award one another prizes for the simple act of doing their jobs well.

To be sure, the professed modesty of our industry is often at odds with the pomp associated with prize giving. And I’m not naive enough to believe that editors and reporters don’t sometimes dream up ambitious projects with contest judges, not readers, foremost in their thoughts.

But I would ask those critics — some of whom have benefited by the awards they lampoon — to take a long, unsparing look at the state of our profession. Prizes like the Pulitzers give our colleagues succor in an industry beset by layoffs and daily pressure to abandon deep digging. They’re indispensable, which is why it’s crucial that they remain vital in the modern media age.