This year’s prize for National Reporting was awarded to an unlikely recipient:
InsideClimate News reporters Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer are the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. The trio took top honors in the category for their work on “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of,” a project that began with a seven-month investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It broadened into an examination of national pipeline safety issues, and how unprepared the nation is for the impending flood of imports of a more corrosive and more dangerous form of oil.
This reach-out to the new brood of lean, small reporting web outfits is really, really gratifying. Their total budget? $550,000. They have no office. Sound familiar? There are only three of them on the Pulitzer team. Dan Nguyen puts the award in further context:
At just 5 years old and with only 7 full-time reporters, InsideClimate News is likely the smallest news organization ever to win in the National Reporting category …
Here’s another size measurement: According to the AP, InsideClimate had about 200,000 page views last month. The winner of last year’s National Reporting Pulitzer, the Huffington Post, is also an online-only news site. But it reportedly racks up a a billion page views a month: i.e., 5,000 times the page views at InsideClimate.
Numbers may seem like a superficial metric, but there’s a reason why big papers dominate every Pulitzer category (except for maybe Public Service) – big investigations require big resources. InsideClimate’s investigation occupied 3 of their reporters for 7 months, a major commitment for a news organization still struggling to draw a daily readership. Even more impressive: InsideClimate is based in Brooklyn, but they invested time and money (i.e. a travel budget) for a story several states away.
The Dish 