I was reading a post by Jeff Jarvis and it hit a note on my subconscious. This is a topic I’ve been struggling about for the past year. When I was invited as a judge for the Fundación de Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano on their yearly awards, I realized that some changes need to be made on this kind of awards, including the Pulitzer.
In general, awards should look to reward innovation, journalistic principles and above all quality. They should not limit themselves to rewarding traditions or old ways of doing things.
Awards have to change their structure from media outlet based to content type based. It is obsolete in this era of fragmented media and audiences to continue giving awards to “newspapers”, “television” and “radio”. Some awards like the Pulitzer have already taken this path but I would suggest breaking them down further by type of content, i.e. politics, economics, technology, etc. Even the Pulitzer only takes into account the web and print when giving awards for Breaking News. How about using other communication tools such as SMS, Twitter or even AIM?
Furthermore, we should move away from rewarding individualistic work and motivate team work. They should shift their focus from rewarding single individuals to coordinate efforts of multidisciplinary teams. The Pulitzers make a great job at this but many awards are still not up to par and many still think of them as individual achievements. I would rather see an award given to the newsroom that managed to cover a breaking news event in the most effective way, making the best use of its available media outlets than rewarding the typical photographer who was at the right place at the right time. We have to incentivize going beyond that.
There should still be categories for individual efforts and for individual skills, almost like in the Oscars, say for “Editing”. But there should be awards for innovation. How about an award for “Best use of Social Networks in the creation and dissemination of a journalistic piece”. It would be great to have entities looking at these type of awards and in themselves disseminating best practices in the cutting edge of media.
Maybe fragmentation is the answer to awards as well. It would only make sense that in a fragmented media world, we had fragmented awards. Fragmenting the awards would also open the door for smaller operations to qualify, that way we can start seeing new names other than the usual suspects with enormous budgets. Rewarding excellence in smaller operations can have a bigger impact on the overall quality of journalism as we all want to learn from examples we can achieve.
Tags: Awards, Fragmentation, Journalism, Media, Pulitzer
Entries (RSS)