Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The media becomes an activist for democracy
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
April 12, 2010, 5:40 p.m.

ProPublica’s expensive story and deserved Pulitzer

Congratulations to ProPublica’s Sheri Fink, who just won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her story about a New Orleans hospital in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (She shared it with Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News.)

We wrote about Fink’s terrific piece twice last fall. First, Zach Seward noted the huge cost of producing the story — $400,000 by one estimate — and the unusual cost-sharing between ProPublica, the Kaiser Foundation, The New York Times Magazine, and Fink herself. And I (gently!) tweaked the piece’s online presentation for not being as reader-friendly as it could have been.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).
POSTED     April 12, 2010, 5:40 p.m.
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”