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Susan Fowler's Uber Expose Should Win a Pulitzer
- supercanuck 9y agoIf Silicon Valley technologists were on the case, we'd still be waiting on "tangible" data indicating there was a problem to begin with.
- pc86 9y agoToo bad Fowler herself is a "Silicon Valley technologist."
- redm 9y agoI only associated Pulitzers with journalists, reporters, writers, and other professionals in that vein. It's a fascinating new era where anyone (not just professionals) could be eligible because of the Web and its ability to connect people.
- Brockenstein 9y agoSo you take a previous Pulitzer prize winning piece and the one variable you change is the author isn't a official journalist™ and now it's not Pulitzer worthy? I would like to be believe the Pulitzer Prize should recognize exceptional work and the fact that exceptional work can come from anywhere shouldn't really be a problem.
- praneshp 9y agoHe never said they should be denied the prize. If I read it correctly, he said it's interesting that it's opened up to everyone now.
- chaostheory 9y ago@Brokenstein may have intended to reply to @mohamedattahri's comment
- jasondemeuse 9y agoI think you totally misunderstood the OP you're replying to. As far as I can tell he is agreeing with your sentiment 100%.
- Eridrus 9y agoTo me, good journalism tries to discover new facts and synthesize the existing information available, which doesn't exactly seem like what Susan Fowler did when she wrote about her personal experience. So, if the goals of the Pulitzer prize were to reward good journalism, I do not think this would be a good choice. However, if the goals of the Pulitzer is to reward good writing that has an impact, regardless of whether it is journalism™ or not, then this seems like a good fit. I feel like the Pulitzer prize leans towards the former though, if you look at the National Reporting Pulitzer this year, it went to WaPo for some Trump reporting, which AFAICT has had no impact whatsoever.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Nothorized 9y agoWell, Lin-Manuel Miranda won a Pulitzer for Hamilton. There is more than just journalists who can be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. For the full list, see the Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories
- jimbokun 9y agoOf those, Public Service is probably the best fit for Fowler's piece. EDIT: As Anders points out in the article.
- mohamedattahri 9y agoWith all due respect to Susan Fowler and her courage, I think this would be an insult to investigative journalism.
- dcwca 9y agoTake a look at the Pulitzer categories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories Only 1 out of 21 categories are reserved for investigative journalism, and there are categories reserved for commentary, criticism, and editorial, all of which are potentially suitable for Fowler's article.
- hlc 9y agoI'm sure how familiar you are with the categories, but really, criticism? None of those are really suitable nor would her blog piece be competitive in a category that would only be potentially suitable. And in my opinion it certainly doesn't deserve a pulitzer in investigative journalism. I think it would be cool to a new category for something like this that better captures the intent of the piece.
- chaostheory 9y agoWhy isn't Fowler's piece considered criticism?
- Paul-ish 9y agoLooking at the prize awardees for criticism, the award is for art criticism. So it wouldn't apply to Fowler's writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Criticism
- chaostheory 9y agoOk, does it not apply to commentary or any other Pulitzer prize category?
- Allower 9y agoWhy does anyone care about Pulitzers? I have literally NEVER seen a satisfactory explanation of why this organization is well regarded.
- wand3r 9y agoIf a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google or Uber. Fowler did something great and it was powerful despite not being her life's focus. There are journalists who are as good as Fowler is at technology. I dont think a Pulitzer is the venue to recognize Susan's work, nor do I think she would win. I do think we should recognize her writing, and believe she has already had a meaningful impact
- smt88 9y ago> built something interesting This is really under-selling what Susan Fowler did. She exposed and reformed a massive, multibillion-dollar company with a single essay. How many journalists have done that? Some, certainly. But not many.
- wand3r 9y agoIt is an analogy. It breaks down. I clearly admire her but am trying to point out that there is someone just like her aiming at a Pulitzer.
- nxsynonym 9y agoShe should be recognized for the work she did, but awarding the pulitzer to this is a reach. I see this as a media-train hop. If this same situation had happened in a multibillion-dollar financial company that didn't have as many subsequent PR issues, would we be praising her as high? I'm not trying to take any thing away from her. I want Uber to crash and burn and be forgotten. I want her to receive as much as possible in terms of justice. What I DON'T want is for this to be spun into click-bait PR for the pulitzer, and tangentially - Uber. What about the millions of women who get harassed daily but work for less "important" companies? Shouldn't they be considered potential pulitzer winners for their blog posts and facebook statuses? The only reason anybody cares is because Uber is A Big Name. This will not change her life for the better. Uber will continue doing as it has been doing. The issue will not be solved. But these articles will get clicked on.
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- logandavis 9y agoAn interesting idea. Fowler certainly deserves credit for her work. As the author correctly notes, it was not only a courageous thing to publish, but also an impressive piece of writing. On an unrelated note, the experience of reading this article for me was absolutely destroyed by the Forbes ad-block-blocker and the ad-first design of their article view. There were a couple of autoplaying video ads and one particularly pernicious scroll-locking ad on the sidebar to the right. Forbes is one of the very worst offenders in web monetization, as they demand you turn off AdBlock and then serve you a garbage reading experience (usually of a poorly written article by an unpaid or low-paid "contributor"). Every time I visit their website, I feel a sudden urge to start espousing Ev William's gospel that Something Must Be Done about content monetization on the internet, before Futurama becomes reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8
- GCA10 9y agoAuthor here ... I feel your pain, every day.
- CamperBob2 9y agoMust be incredibly frustrating for you. Forbes is a prestigious outlet, a place where you should be proud to publish your work... yet they go out of their way to make it a huge hassle to read it. I wish you had other options. :(
- GCA10 9y agoThat's gracious, thanks. Still, each writing home has its own mix of +/-. The overall Forbes environment offers fast turnaround, editorial freedom and sizable readership. And it pays! Getting 80% of my top five priorities in one stop is about as good as it ever gets. Still, writing with fewer ads has its appeal, too. I'll mix things up every now and then with some postings for Quora, Technology Review, WSJ, etc., which fill in other circles in life's Venn diagram.
- bspn 9y agoI've stopped reading Forbes articles because of it. I have no problem with sites monetizing their valuable content (I subscribe to the WSJ and FT because I generally value their product), but the in-your-face "you may not proceed" approach employed by Forbes really irks me for some reason.
- tptacek 9y agoJack Schafer's piece on the superficiality of the Pulitzers comes to mind[1]. Awarding one to Fowler might be a decent corrective. [1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/04/so_you_won_a_pulitzer.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...
- shawn-butler 9y agoYes awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama certainly did wonders. It would be better to simply not award one if there is no actually worthy work rather than pander to cultural whims.
- danial 9y agoThe Forbes article references the article with this useless link: http://www.linkedin.com/today/ http://www.linkedin.com/today/ Here is the correct link: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
- GCA10 9y agoAuthor here ... Thanks for the catch. I just repaired the article link so that it works, too.
- 6stringmerc 9y agoGreat example of a Personal Essay struggling with Truth and Context in ways that resonate with others. It's quite easy to dismiss a Person / Former Employee Complaints with "Oh that's just your experience, it's not a real problem" but it's not Honest[1]. There's merit in sharing personal truths by way of anecdote. Change can follow. [1] Hysterical delivery, too much emotion, swearing, or just bad writing can ruin a piece's impact before it gets to its message, but when done with great craft, it's a sight to behold.
- Cuntaholic 9y agoThis is what happens when you people get 8th place trophies
- Whatacunt 9y agoA whole lot of weak cunts in here
- shruubi 9y agoSusan Fowlers piece was powerful, and definitely deserving of some kind of award/commendation, but I'm not sure if a Pulitzer is the right kind of award. My understanding is the Pulitzer is for investigative journalism, which I wouldn't call her article purely because the intent was not to embed yourself into Uber for a year and research/experience all the messed up things that went on with the intent to publish an expose. Also, and maybe I have the wrong impression from TV/Movies, but I was under the impression that the Pulitzer usually gets awarded to investigative journalists who expose corruption/scandals on a larger scale than this.
- sjg007 9y agoI think it will be decided by the committee whether she gets the Pulitzer or not. Certainly there's a lot of paper out there around uber that contributes to the impact. But her commentary also has larger implications and in some sense reflects for better or worse society at large. We see it in the Senate confirmations and in the Congressional inquiries where members of Congress and the Senate are accused of being hysterical or otherwise out of order. We have a president who bragged about sexual assault. So it doesn't matter if she's a journalist or not.. she brought a spotlight to bear on an issue we largely ignore which is about the treatment of women.
- GeneMoody 9y agoAre you guys out of your minds?! She was someone that couldn't even last a year doing a job she was hired for, went to Graduate school during that time (PAID by Uber), had time to write a "best selling" book, had time to go to speaking events, based on her own self-admitted assessment needed to prove herself in the position she was hired for, and clearly instead of actually doing her job, had spent most of her work day sending emails to HR, and then wrote a he-says she-says OPINION PIECE WITH ZERO FACTUAL EVIDENCE......... And now she's some kind of martyr or a hero????? What is wrong with this world that we live in?????
- GeneMoody 9y agoAre you guys out of your minds?! She was someone that couldn't even last a year doing a job she was hired for, went to Graduate school during that time (PAID by Uber), had time to write a "best selling" book, had time to go to speaking events, based on her own self-admitted assessment needed to prove herself in the position she was hired for, and clearly instead of actually doing her job, had spent most of her work day sending emails to HR, and then wrote a he-says she-says OPINION PIECE WITH ZERO FACTUAL EVIDENCE......... And now she's some kind of martyr or a hero????? What is wrong with this world that we live in?????
- 711seveneleven 9y agoDisclaimer: I am not a writer and don't know anything about the Pulitzer, or even the criteria/categories, so my comment is genuinely curious here: I'm not trying to downplay the importance and impact of Fowler's work, however, it seems a bit weird to me to award a Pulitzer using any of its existing categories. (Whether or not a new category should be created for her or whether an existing category's criteria be changed to allow for her work is a separate matter entirely). The reason being is that I feel (with my admittedly complete amateurish opinion here) is that journalism as a craft should deal with the nature of third-party and objective investigating and reporting. There is a huge objective nature to journalism. Oftentimes, the expose or journalistic work undertaken by the journalist is about a third-party occurrence or individual(s), not about the journalist themselves. Journalism is a noble profession. Example: War journalists. Soldiers risk their lives for their country; journalists risk their lives for something even less than that: a story. The story is almost never about the hardships the journalist undertook to report on such a story, only how those hardships affected others. Not the journalist themselves. They are removed and external to the story. Out of the picture frame, so to speak. The journalist recognizes that they are simply an external observer, with the key difference between themselves and who they report on is that they have luckily been blessed with the platform, the podium, from which their voice can be heard. They have the means to speak to the masses, and they must speak, but not for themselves. For others. Those that are unheard. It's not "I was rained on for three days straight camping out in the mountainside" it's "THEY were rained on for three days camping out in the mountainside". My point behind all this is that at the heart of it, while Fowler's work was certainly impactful and shed light on a lot of issues at Uber/tech, it was not really journalism. There was no research and no investigation done into the treatment of women at Uber, other than a brief mention of her chatting with other women at the company who experienced a similar situation with the same manager she had. Other than that, it was mostly what happened to her. Arguably, I would feel like this should disqualify her even for the Public Service Pulitzer (which is usually awarded to newspapers, not individuals anyways), as the philosophy of Fowler's blog did not seem be in line with what I would consider to be journalism: the service of lending a voice to the voiceless. She wasn't speaking for others so much as she was speaking for herself. Does that matter? After all, can't you say that a lot of external good came out of her personal blog on her personal experiences? I think it matters. I think journalism should remain objective and external to the reporter. There's too much of a conflict of interest and incentive to embellish details otherwise, when speaking and reporting for yourself and your benefit. Tangential to this point is the fact that this story "fell into her lap" by virtue of it happening to her. She didn't seek out this story, something that was hidden in view. She merely recounted her experience. I'd give more credence to her blog as journalism if she made a marked effort to make the story more than just about her, even though the harassment happened to her as well. I'm not trying to discount her story for a Pulitzer by virtue of Fowler not being a journalist, I am arguing on a philosophical level, a recount of something that happened to you is not journalism.