20 ms·

A journalism student who found out she won a Pulitzer in class

614 points by mrleiter 9y ago

intrasight 9y ago
Fantastic!
mcherm 9y ago
Much of the credit goes to The Cincinnati Enquirer for having the ethics to include interns on the byline. As they should, but not everyone would do so.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  This is exactly it. This was clearly a team effort. Like 60 people won the same Pulitzer. But it's quite clear that even as an intern, this individual's contributions were very important. I love team awards.
  - philliphaydon 9y ago
    Team awards don’t seem to exist for the advertising industry even tho its a team effort to do the work to win them.
    - awat 9y ago
      That’s a shame spreading the credit helps build loyalty which keeps those award winning teams in place.
      - aggie 9y ago
        To play devil's advocate, an intern with a Pulitzer (or similarly prestigious award) on their resume is going to have a lot of job opportunities.
        tsunamifury 9y ago
        You’d be surprised how dire the situation is in most newsrooms, and how petty the competition is.
        godzillabrennus 9y ago
        If your head hasn’t been in the ground for the last twenty years you should have an idea on how bad the business is. Here is a recent article about the situation if indeed your head is below ground: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-news-041152018-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-news-041...
        smichel17 9y ago
        I found this comment fairly condescending and presumptuous. Not everyone has the time and ability to follow everything. That doesn't mean their "head is below the ground." Twenty years ago, I was an infant.
        georgebarnett 9y ago
        Its not just newsrooms. Many teams allow internal politiking to take precedence over working together. As a result, they're at war with themselves _and_ trying to compete in the market for customers. As you might imagine, teams which do not have this conflict have substantially more time to focus on their customers.
        jrockway 9y ago
        An intern whose work won the Pulitzer but wasn't listed on the byline is probably not going to want to work for you again, for fear of that happening again. It goes both ways.
        kabacha 9y ago
        Unfortunately it's accepted in the industry not to get bilines while you're an internet or a new guy, so I'm sure interns don't have any expectations because of this culture.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      The Clio Awards do (source: I won one as part of the Media Lab team at Bleacher Report). They credit the team but specifically name the individual members as well. The Clios are pretty big as industry awards go.
      - rishaanpatel 8y ago
        Peggy worked on Glo-Coat, but only Don won the Clio.
        abritinthebay 8y ago
        I’m assuming they got better since the fictional 60s ;)
  - calimac 9y ago
    Yes, She had the idea to create the database out of unstructured paper arrest slips which gave coverage and statistical credibility to the effort. Key in the entire operation.
    - adfm 9y ago
      Exactly this. She deserves the attention she's getting. And she did the grunt work daily, which is important to call out. Reminds me of the ChicagoCrime.org feet-on-street data wrangling story. A great idea and the persistence to follow through.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        Not to mention visiting the county jail each morning, when most interns would just be out getting Starbucks.
        pranau 9y ago
        > when most interns would just be out getting Starbucks. On the contrary, most interns I know wouldn't be doing this because of how overworked they are doing the grunt work.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Agreed. New Zealand’s semi national paper prints unattributed reddit comments on a regular basis. It’s grim.
  - bonestamp2 9y ago
    Da fuck? What am I spending all that time on reddit for then? But seriously, I am actually an award winning writer (and it's not even my profession, it's just a hobby) and I do comment on reddit a lot... they're stealing comments without attribution? Ethics aside, that's just terrible journalism to say the least.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > Da fuck? What am I spending all that time on reddit for then? Whenever I see youtube clips on evening news, my thought is the exact opposite - why am I bothering to watch this, when I can just head over to YouTube and catch it without a pair of talking heads doing their own version of a Reaction Video about it?
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      I got quoted in international business times, which struck me as funny. http://www.ibtimes.com/hackers-warn-about-future-threats-how-guard-against-next-heartbleed-1573074 http://www.ibtimes.com/hackers-warn-about-future-threats-how... That comment was from Reddit.
- talltimtom 9y ago
  Honestly why should they? The Interns did exactly what they were told, the went and jotted down details. Is that Pulitzer Prize worthy work? Does the helper who whipes Einstein’s blackboard during the break deserve partial credit for what he put on it? I get that it’s a fun story but it honestly just seems redicules.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - theoctopus 9y ago
    Had you actually read the article, you would have seen that: > From there, she took it upon herself to create a database for Enquirer reporters, documenting the time, location, and nature of every opioid-related arrest that occured over those days. The article also says that because of that database they were able to fill gaps in the article and make it as compelling as it was.
    - philosopher1234 9y ago
      She seems worthy of being added to the byline, but I don't think its right for you to be so dismissive of OP's point. GP wrote a statement that sounds like "interns should be added to the byline for pulitzer prizes." The way its written sounds like a general statement. In reality, I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation (as in, the word "should" seems inappropriate.) We should consider what makes someones work Pullitzer prize worthy. I'd speculate (because I don't know much about journalism) that it really comes down to doing outstanding work, more than is usually expected of any individual, and for succeeding on metrics that are hard to succeed on. This intern did something valuable, adding things to the database, and probably coming up with the idea for the database herself, but does this meet the criteria of being truly standout, incredible work? The nature of this particular award that it was given to the entire staff who contributed substantially to the coverage, seems like she is thus worthy, but I don't think treating OP like they're being ridiculous is reasonable. This is a worthwhile question. I think a lot of people on this site are familiar with awards being given to people who don't seem to deserve it, so investigating this topic, for a case that resembles that pattern, doesn't seem so offensive or outrageous as you've kind of termed it.
- claforte 9y ago
  I'm sure that sense of ethic will pay for itself for years to come. They will get the best students applying for internships.
eksemplar 9y ago
It sounds like she earned it too, tracking and pursuing data and building it into a usable databank. Good job.
fluxic 9y ago
So cool!!! What a slayer
pgrote 9y ago
This is the series: https://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-heroin-epidemic-cincinnati/ https://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-... It is a tremendous work of crafting mixed media.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  This kind of reporting is becoming an endangered species. It requires a lot of man-hours, and isn't as profitable as the minimal effort required to regurgitate whatever the latest sensational scandal is.
  - IAmEveryone 9y ago
    I love how even a story about excellent journalism can be turned into an insult of the profession at large. As far as I can tell, there is an avalanche (that’s a reference) of excellent, deeply reported stories, making good use of technology, on important subjects both titilating and not. Just go through the other award winners, or the webby award nominees in the relevant categories.
    - FullyFunctional 9y ago
      Maybe it's just me but I didn't read the comment that way. I'm sure everyone in the business would prefer to do that kind of deep reporting, but the economy of the business just doesn't reward that. It's a real problem but I don't think anyone is blaming the journalists. If anything, the ones to blame are the people reading the scandalous stories. I'm certainly not perfect, but I'm increasingly good at ignoring click-bait links. EDIT: fixed a critical typo
      - shubb 9y ago
        I think the ways people find news on the net are also to blame. I knew someone who worked for a company that monitored newswires and other media all day watching for breaking stories. They then rewrote them in an SEO or viral friendly way, propagated them through social media using bots or an influencer network. By being the first to publish something that ranked on news aggregators, they could pull in views and get ad money. If the story was from a subscription newswire I guess this is okay. If you are writing a story reporting someone else reported a story you are kinda stealing revenue from the people who did the hunting. But whoever does that will win, and writing a story that will spread then getting it to the aggregators is a skill.
topkai22 9y ago
That’s awesome! But I kept getting distracted thinking “why does safari cut her face and legs get in portrait mode”
- califreze 9y ago
  Actually it seems like the image is actually that way for some reason...
- jlarocco 9y ago
  I don't know about Safari, but the website kinda sucks in general. I wasn't able to scroll for the first few minutes the page was open. I switched tabs to whine about it here, switched back, and suddenly I could scroll.
bspn 9y ago
Congratulations to her. I remember reading the piece at the time (linked from here actually!) and thinking it was a sad but powerful expose on the epidemic. It's so easy to see the statistics and just move on, but the Enquirer team did a fantastic job at providing human insight and showing the stark impact the opioid crisis is having on entire communities.
compiler-guy 9y ago
She won a pulitzer not just while in _a_ class, but while she was in a _journalism_ class.
jacquesm 9y ago
Journalism - real journalism, not blogging - matters. I've been thinking of buying a newspaper subscription again because I feel that even though newspapers typically lag 24 hours or so behind what you can read online someone needs to keep these people employed so they can do there very necessary jobs. I don't think it is possible to have anything resembling a democracy in the modern age without a free press.
- acdha 9y ago
  This is why I subscribe. Journalism is really important and it’s been hit really hard by the shift in the advertising industry. This goes double if you subscribe to something in addition to the NYT or WaPo — a ton of local stories have been ignored because the regional press was cut to the bone and there’s really no substitute for reporters who live in the area.
- sneak 9y ago
  Blogging and tweeting (and podcasting, and Facebook Liveing, er c) are also Real Journalism.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    The medium is not the message, in this case. Content matters, not format.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  I started feeling that way a couple of years ago, and currently have three online newspaper subscriptions, two national and one local. I mostly end up getting to those stories from Twitter links (or from facebook for stories in the local paper), rather than the front page of the paper, but real journalism is absolutely vital to a functioning democracy (and ours is in a dangerous place right now), so I want to contribute to that. As an aside: WaPo is cheap-as-free if you have an Amazon Prime subscription (several months free, and then the price goes up to something like the price of a cup of coffee every month), and they've broken a number of really important stories just in the past couple of years. I can't think of many reasons for folks who already have Prime to not have a WaPo subscription. It's good, neutral and well-sourced, journalism at a great price, so it's one of my national paper subscriptions.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
That is both super amazing and uniquely hard to imagine experiencing. It has to be surreal, in a journalism class, learning you've won Journalism's highest honor. I thought it also interesting that the students were more concerned that they would get in trouble for using a phone in class than with the import of the event. I don't think she will have much difficulty finding a job after she graduates with that on her resume :-). I was trying to imagine a CS student applying for a job where it mentions they have already won the Turing award. That would be crazy.
- qntty 9y ago
  I guess the reason that this is possible in a field like journalism is because it's no theory-light in comparison to a theory-heavy discipline like CS. The extreme of theory-lightness would be something like swimming where Michael Phelps can break a world record at 15.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Not really. Pulitzer is for one piece of good work. Bill Gates proved a pancake theorem in college. Many Thiel fellows are under 21 doing award winning work in sciences. Jacob Lurie won the Westinghouse/Intel talent search in high school with professional quality mathematician work. Lots college kids win startup hackathon awards, akin to the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer doesn't honor the best work or the greatest achievements, just a sampling of great work.
- pudo 9y ago
  I think the bit about not wanting to interrupt the class may also have to do with the lecturer. She's an amazing bad-ass herself: "Her investigations have led to more than 50 criminal cases against politicians, businessmen and public officials, and pursued by law-enforcement in Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, France, Finland and the United States." (https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-journalism-school-appoints-award-winning-journalist-giannina-segnini-its-first-knight-chair https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-journalism-school-a...)
sneak 9y ago
They should have gone upstairs and pulled her out of class beforehand and demanded she sit in the announcement proceedings.
- macintux 9y ago
  I'd wager that the intersection of the sets of people who knew they were going to win the Pulitzer and the people who knew she was anywhere near the event was entirely empty.
Tagore 9y ago
Interestingly it is very difficult to figure out what the story she reported on is about given all the hoopla around a Latina winning the Pulitzer.
- Tagore 9y ago
  Note that the linked story is _about_ the fact that a female philipino undergrad won a Pulitzer, but does not explain much about about the story she reported on that won a Pulitzer I'm not arguing that she shouldn't have won a Pulitzer for her reporting if her reporting were genuinely worthy of a Pulitzer (it wasn't, but that's another story,) but... srsly?
  - rootlocus 9y ago
    > Note that the linked story is _about_ the fact that a female philipino undergrad won a Pulitzer Nowhere in the article is mentioned that she's a philipino. > but does not explain much about about the story she reported on that won a Pulitzer Published in September 2017, the story, “Seven Days of Heroin,” prompted a nationwide conversation about the opioid crisis, reflected in newsrooms around the country. Just follow the link to the story and read the first paragraphs. > I'm not arguing that she shouldn't have won a Pulitzer for her reporting if her reporting were genuinely worthy of a Pulitzer Who would argue that and expect to be taken seriously? > (it wasn't, but that's another story,) Have you even read it?
- kemayo 9y ago
  It was quite easy to figure out what the story she worked on what about, as approximately a third of the linked article is devoted to explaining that story and how she contributed to it. Is there any gender/race stuff here? The linked story doesn't bring her race up at all, and only mentions her gender to the extent that it uses pronouns. I went and did a quick google news search, and didn't see any discussion of it in those terms, though I'll certainly admit I might have missed it. For that matter, in this comments section, you're the only one who brought either of those things up. What's up with that?
- Ngunyan 9y ago
Tagore 9y ago
Oh plz... just as Obama was given the Nobel peace prize before becoming President (and killing a lot of people by bombing them once he was President.) Did we just award the Pulitzer to an undergrad? OK- but let's not pretend that the Pulitzer matters.
- khazhoux 9y ago
  I think your point is that awards are overrated.
  - Tagore 9y ago
    Awards could be made to matter, I suppose, but if they are simply a matter of culture war signaling I'm not inclined to take them very seriously.
    - salvar 8y ago
      I'm sure Pulitzer winners will try to cope with this.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  No, the Pulitzer prize was awarded to a team that included a rising masters student.
wst_ 9y ago
Is swearing, especially saying "fuck you", usual way to congratulate someone in US?
- khazhoux 9y ago
  Where are you getting this idea from?
  - scrumption 9y ago
    Read the article before commenting?
    - khazhoux 9y ago
      I did, thanks for the tip though. I missed the "FUCK YOU" in the text message image. Sorry!!
- sigspec 9y ago
  Yes
- tomerico 9y ago
  It's conveying jealousy / flattery in the context of that text message.
- empath75 9y ago
  They’re basically just expressing envy. You wouldn’t say that to a work colleague but a close friend sure.
- dag11 9y ago
  Yep! I'm the same age as her, and this is how we all speak to each other immediately upon earning/winning/receiving something incredible. It's from a place of love, but only works with friends and close acquaintances.
  - wst_ 9y ago
RIMR 9y ago
That story was absolutely amazing. The most shocking part of it to me was that there is an organized effort to ban cops from carrying Naxalone, because some people actually believe that heroin addicts deserve to die... We live in a sick world...
- aaron695 9y ago
  Citation? I find it a strange concept. In general there is an argument against which is - it's better suited to medical professionals. Which is far from "because heroin addicts deserve to die" At best a we don't care argument.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > because some people actually believe that heroin addicts deserve to die... You only have to look towards the Philippines to know the kind of results such an attitude if left unchecked can engender.
GreeniFi 9y ago
Legend! Well done lass!
franciscop 9y ago
Not even comparable, but one of the most incredible moments in my life was while I was studying at university. I joined a NASA competition with a friend and we worked really hard to win, and so we did. The next morning in class, as I went through the door, my classmates stood up and started cheering and clapping at me. I had some sort of happiness brain meltdown where I didn't even know how to react. From that moment, students I didn't know from all majors stopped me at the campus cafeteria and hallways to ask me about it. I think being recognized by your peers in this way gives a different kind of perspective/feeling that I had never felt before.
gigatexal 9y ago
That she created a database to document things and it was used by others is amazing to the nerd in me. Congrats to her! I think she will do amazing things in the future — she’s so humble.
ConcernedCoder 9y ago
I only made it about 1/2 way through the story, it's so awful I had to just close it and look away... I can't believe this is really happening right now in America, what can possibly be done to help people, that for the most part, don't want to be helped?

614 points by mrleiter 9y ago

Fantastic!

Much of the credit goes to The Cincinnati Enquirer for having the ethics to include interns on the byline. As they should, but not everyone would do so.

Waterluvian 9y ago
This is exactly it. This was clearly a team effort. Like 60 people won the same Pulitzer. But it's quite clear that even as an intern, this individual's contributions were very important. I love team awards.
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  Team awards don’t seem to exist for the advertising industry even tho its a team effort to do the work to win them.
  - awat 9y ago
    That’s a shame spreading the credit helps build loyalty which keeps those award winning teams in place.
    - aggie 9y ago
      To play devil's advocate, an intern with a Pulitzer (or similarly prestigious award) on their resume is going to have a lot of job opportunities.
      - tsunamifury 9y ago
        You’d be surprised how dire the situation is in most newsrooms, and how petty the competition is.
        godzillabrennus 9y ago
        If your head hasn’t been in the ground for the last twenty years you should have an idea on how bad the business is. Here is a recent article about the situation if indeed your head is below ground: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-news-041152018-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-news-041...
        smichel17 9y ago
        I found this comment fairly condescending and presumptuous. Not everyone has the time and ability to follow everything. That doesn't mean their "head is below the ground." Twenty years ago, I was an infant.
        georgebarnett 9y ago
        Its not just newsrooms. Many teams allow internal politiking to take precedence over working together. As a result, they're at war with themselves _and_ trying to compete in the market for customers. As you might imagine, teams which do not have this conflict have substantially more time to focus on their customers.
      - jrockway 9y ago
        An intern whose work won the Pulitzer but wasn't listed on the byline is probably not going to want to work for you again, for fear of that happening again. It goes both ways.
        kabacha 9y ago
        Unfortunately it's accepted in the industry not to get bilines while you're an internet or a new guy, so I'm sure interns don't have any expectations because of this culture.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    The Clio Awards do (source: I won one as part of the Media Lab team at Bleacher Report). They credit the team but specifically name the individual members as well. The Clios are pretty big as industry awards go.
    - rishaanpatel 8y ago
      Peggy worked on Glo-Coat, but only Don won the Clio.
      - abritinthebay 8y ago
        I’m assuming they got better since the fictional 60s ;)
- calimac 9y ago
  Yes, She had the idea to create the database out of unstructured paper arrest slips which gave coverage and statistical credibility to the effort. Key in the entire operation.
  - adfm 9y ago
    Exactly this. She deserves the attention she's getting. And she did the grunt work daily, which is important to call out. Reminds me of the ChicagoCrime.org feet-on-street data wrangling story. A great idea and the persistence to follow through.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      Not to mention visiting the county jail each morning, when most interns would just be out getting Starbucks.
      - pranau 9y ago
        > when most interns would just be out getting Starbucks. On the contrary, most interns I know wouldn't be doing this because of how overworked they are doing the grunt work.
lostlogin 9y ago
Agreed. New Zealand’s semi national paper prints unattributed reddit comments on a regular basis. It’s grim.
- bonestamp2 9y ago
  Da fuck? What am I spending all that time on reddit for then? But seriously, I am actually an award winning writer (and it's not even my profession, it's just a hobby) and I do comment on reddit a lot... they're stealing comments without attribution? Ethics aside, that's just terrible journalism to say the least.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Da fuck? What am I spending all that time on reddit for then? Whenever I see youtube clips on evening news, my thought is the exact opposite - why am I bothering to watch this, when I can just head over to YouTube and catch it without a pair of talking heads doing their own version of a Reaction Video about it?
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I got quoted in international business times, which struck me as funny. http://www.ibtimes.com/hackers-warn-about-future-threats-how-guard-against-next-heartbleed-1573074 http://www.ibtimes.com/hackers-warn-about-future-threats-how... That comment was from Reddit.
talltimtom 9y ago
Honestly why should they? The Interns did exactly what they were told, the went and jotted down details. Is that Pulitzer Prize worthy work? Does the helper who whipes Einstein’s blackboard during the break deserve partial credit for what he put on it? I get that it’s a fun story but it honestly just seems redicules.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- theoctopus 9y ago
  Had you actually read the article, you would have seen that: > From there, she took it upon herself to create a database for Enquirer reporters, documenting the time, location, and nature of every opioid-related arrest that occured over those days. The article also says that because of that database they were able to fill gaps in the article and make it as compelling as it was.
  - philosopher1234 9y ago
    She seems worthy of being added to the byline, but I don't think its right for you to be so dismissive of OP's point. GP wrote a statement that sounds like "interns should be added to the byline for pulitzer prizes." The way its written sounds like a general statement. In reality, I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation (as in, the word "should" seems inappropriate.) We should consider what makes someones work Pullitzer prize worthy. I'd speculate (because I don't know much about journalism) that it really comes down to doing outstanding work, more than is usually expected of any individual, and for succeeding on metrics that are hard to succeed on. This intern did something valuable, adding things to the database, and probably coming up with the idea for the database herself, but does this meet the criteria of being truly standout, incredible work? The nature of this particular award that it was given to the entire staff who contributed substantially to the coverage, seems like she is thus worthy, but I don't think treating OP like they're being ridiculous is reasonable. This is a worthwhile question. I think a lot of people on this site are familiar with awards being given to people who don't seem to deserve it, so investigating this topic, for a case that resembles that pattern, doesn't seem so offensive or outrageous as you've kind of termed it.
claforte 9y ago
I'm sure that sense of ethic will pay for itself for years to come. They will get the best students applying for internships.

eksemplar 9y ago

It sounds like she earned it too, tracking and pursuing data and building it into a usable databank. Good job.

fluxic 9y ago

So cool!!! What a slayer

pgrote 9y ago

This is the series: https://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-heroin-epidemic-cincinnati/ https://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-... It is a tremendous work of crafting mixed media.

toomanybeersies 9y ago
This kind of reporting is becoming an endangered species. It requires a lot of man-hours, and isn't as profitable as the minimal effort required to regurgitate whatever the latest sensational scandal is.
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  I love how even a story about excellent journalism can be turned into an insult of the profession at large. As far as I can tell, there is an avalanche (that’s a reference) of excellent, deeply reported stories, making good use of technology, on important subjects both titilating and not. Just go through the other award winners, or the webby award nominees in the relevant categories.
  - FullyFunctional 9y ago
    Maybe it's just me but I didn't read the comment that way. I'm sure everyone in the business would prefer to do that kind of deep reporting, but the economy of the business just doesn't reward that. It's a real problem but I don't think anyone is blaming the journalists. If anything, the ones to blame are the people reading the scandalous stories. I'm certainly not perfect, but I'm increasingly good at ignoring click-bait links. EDIT: fixed a critical typo
    - shubb 9y ago
      I think the ways people find news on the net are also to blame. I knew someone who worked for a company that monitored newswires and other media all day watching for breaking stories. They then rewrote them in an SEO or viral friendly way, propagated them through social media using bots or an influencer network. By being the first to publish something that ranked on news aggregators, they could pull in views and get ad money. If the story was from a subscription newswire I guess this is okay. If you are writing a story reporting someone else reported a story you are kinda stealing revenue from the people who did the hunting. But whoever does that will win, and writing a story that will spread then getting it to the aggregators is a skill.

topkai22 9y ago

That’s awesome! But I kept getting distracted thinking “why does safari cut her face and legs get in portrait mode”

califreze 9y ago
Actually it seems like the image is actually that way for some reason...
jlarocco 9y ago
I don't know about Safari, but the website kinda sucks in general. I wasn't able to scroll for the first few minutes the page was open. I switched tabs to whine about it here, switched back, and suddenly I could scroll.

bspn 9y ago

Congratulations to her. I remember reading the piece at the time (linked from here actually!) and thinking it was a sad but powerful expose on the epidemic. It's so easy to see the statistics and just move on, but the Enquirer team did a fantastic job at providing human insight and showing the stark impact the opioid crisis is having on entire communities.

compiler-guy 9y ago

She won a pulitzer not just while in _a_ class, but while she was in a _journalism_ class.

jacquesm 9y ago

Journalism - real journalism, not blogging - matters. I've been thinking of buying a newspaper subscription again because I feel that even though newspapers typically lag 24 hours or so behind what you can read online someone needs to keep these people employed so they can do there very necessary jobs. I don't think it is possible to have anything resembling a democracy in the modern age without a free press.

acdha 9y ago
This is why I subscribe. Journalism is really important and it’s been hit really hard by the shift in the advertising industry. This goes double if you subscribe to something in addition to the NYT or WaPo — a ton of local stories have been ignored because the regional press was cut to the bone and there’s really no substitute for reporters who live in the area.
sneak 9y ago
Blogging and tweeting (and podcasting, and Facebook Liveing, er c) are also Real Journalism.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  The medium is not the message, in this case. Content matters, not format.
SwellJoe 9y ago
I started feeling that way a couple of years ago, and currently have three online newspaper subscriptions, two national and one local. I mostly end up getting to those stories from Twitter links (or from facebook for stories in the local paper), rather than the front page of the paper, but real journalism is absolutely vital to a functioning democracy (and ours is in a dangerous place right now), so I want to contribute to that. As an aside: WaPo is cheap-as-free if you have an Amazon Prime subscription (several months free, and then the price goes up to something like the price of a cup of coffee every month), and they've broken a number of really important stories just in the past couple of years. I can't think of many reasons for folks who already have Prime to not have a WaPo subscription. It's good, neutral and well-sourced, journalism at a great price, so it's one of my national paper subscriptions.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

That is both super amazing and uniquely hard to imagine experiencing. It has to be surreal, in a journalism class, learning you've won Journalism's highest honor. I thought it also interesting that the students were more concerned that they would get in trouble for using a phone in class than with the import of the event. I don't think she will have much difficulty finding a job after she graduates with that on her resume :-). I was trying to imagine a CS student applying for a job where it mentions they have already won the Turing award. That would be crazy.

qntty 9y ago
I guess the reason that this is possible in a field like journalism is because it's no theory-light in comparison to a theory-heavy discipline like CS. The extreme of theory-lightness would be something like swimming where Michael Phelps can break a world record at 15.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Not really. Pulitzer is for one piece of good work. Bill Gates proved a pancake theorem in college. Many Thiel fellows are under 21 doing award winning work in sciences. Jacob Lurie won the Westinghouse/Intel talent search in high school with professional quality mathematician work. Lots college kids win startup hackathon awards, akin to the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer doesn't honor the best work or the greatest achievements, just a sampling of great work.
pudo 9y ago
I think the bit about not wanting to interrupt the class may also have to do with the lecturer. She's an amazing bad-ass herself: "Her investigations have led to more than 50 criminal cases against politicians, businessmen and public officials, and pursued by law-enforcement in Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, France, Finland and the United States." (https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-journalism-school-appoints-award-winning-journalist-giannina-segnini-its-first-knight-chair https://journalism.columbia.edu/columbia-journalism-school-a...)

sneak 9y ago

They should have gone upstairs and pulled her out of class beforehand and demanded she sit in the announcement proceedings.

macintux 9y ago
I'd wager that the intersection of the sets of people who knew they were going to win the Pulitzer and the people who knew she was anywhere near the event was entirely empty.

Tagore 9y ago

Interestingly it is very difficult to figure out what the story she reported on is about given all the hoopla around a Latina winning the Pulitzer.

Tagore 9y ago
Note that the linked story is _about_ the fact that a female philipino undergrad won a Pulitzer, but does not explain much about about the story she reported on that won a Pulitzer I'm not arguing that she shouldn't have won a Pulitzer for her reporting if her reporting were genuinely worthy of a Pulitzer (it wasn't, but that's another story,) but... srsly?
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > Note that the linked story is _about_ the fact that a female philipino undergrad won a Pulitzer Nowhere in the article is mentioned that she's a philipino. > but does not explain much about about the story she reported on that won a Pulitzer Published in September 2017, the story, “Seven Days of Heroin,” prompted a nationwide conversation about the opioid crisis, reflected in newsrooms around the country. Just follow the link to the story and read the first paragraphs. > I'm not arguing that she shouldn't have won a Pulitzer for her reporting if her reporting were genuinely worthy of a Pulitzer Who would argue that and expect to be taken seriously? > (it wasn't, but that's another story,) Have you even read it?
kemayo 9y ago
It was quite easy to figure out what the story she worked on what about, as approximately a third of the linked article is devoted to explaining that story and how she contributed to it. Is there any gender/race stuff here? The linked story doesn't bring her race up at all, and only mentions her gender to the extent that it uses pronouns. I went and did a quick google news search, and didn't see any discussion of it in those terms, though I'll certainly admit I might have missed it. For that matter, in this comments section, you're the only one who brought either of those things up. What's up with that?
Ngunyan 9y ago

Tagore 9y ago

Oh plz... just as Obama was given the Nobel peace prize before becoming President (and killing a lot of people by bombing them once he was President.) Did we just award the Pulitzer to an undergrad? OK- but let's not pretend that the Pulitzer matters.

khazhoux 9y ago
I think your point is that awards are overrated.
- Tagore 9y ago
  Awards could be made to matter, I suppose, but if they are simply a matter of culture war signaling I'm not inclined to take them very seriously.
  - salvar 8y ago
    I'm sure Pulitzer winners will try to cope with this.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
No, the Pulitzer prize was awarded to a team that included a rising masters student.

wst_ 9y ago

Is swearing, especially saying "fuck you", usual way to congratulate someone in US?

khazhoux 9y ago
Where are you getting this idea from?
- scrumption 9y ago
  Read the article before commenting?
  - khazhoux 9y ago
    I did, thanks for the tip though. I missed the "FUCK YOU" in the text message image. Sorry!!
sigspec 9y ago
Yes
tomerico 9y ago
It's conveying jealousy / flattery in the context of that text message.
empath75 9y ago
They’re basically just expressing envy. You wouldn’t say that to a work colleague but a close friend sure.
dag11 9y ago
Yep! I'm the same age as her, and this is how we all speak to each other immediately upon earning/winning/receiving something incredible. It's from a place of love, but only works with friends and close acquaintances.
- wst_ 9y ago

RIMR 9y ago

That story was absolutely amazing. The most shocking part of it to me was that there is an organized effort to ban cops from carrying Naxalone, because some people actually believe that heroin addicts deserve to die... We live in a sick world...

aaron695 9y ago
Citation? I find it a strange concept. In general there is an argument against which is - it's better suited to medical professionals. Which is far from "because heroin addicts deserve to die" At best a we don't care argument.
jacquesm 9y ago
> because some people actually believe that heroin addicts deserve to die... You only have to look towards the Philippines to know the kind of results such an attitude if left unchecked can engender.

GreeniFi 9y ago

Legend! Well done lass!

franciscop 9y ago

Not even comparable, but one of the most incredible moments in my life was while I was studying at university. I joined a NASA competition with a friend and we worked really hard to win, and so we did. The next morning in class, as I went through the door, my classmates stood up and started cheering and clapping at me. I had some sort of happiness brain meltdown where I didn't even know how to react. From that moment, students I didn't know from all majors stopped me at the campus cafeteria and hallways to ask me about it. I think being recognized by your peers in this way gives a different kind of perspective/feeling that I had never felt before.

gigatexal 9y ago

That she created a database to document things and it was used by others is amazing to the nerd in me. Congrats to her! I think she will do amazing things in the future — she’s so humble.

ConcernedCoder 9y ago

I only made it about 1/2 way through the story, it's so awful I had to just close it and look away... I can't believe this is really happening right now in America, what can possibly be done to help people, that for the most part, don't want to be helped?