The Pulitzer Prize scam

Investigative journalists hand out awards to themselves, as do online reporters, alt-weeklies, business journalists and games journalists. The Dart Center gives eight prizes for trauma reporting, the Cabot Prizes honor work that advances “Inter-American understanding,” and the Sidney Hillman Foundation gives both American and Canadian prizes for pieces that serve the common good.

There are awards for media writers, young journalists, courageous journalists, black journalists and journalism, innovative journalism, works that right wrongs, human interest stories, superior journalism, public interest journalism, and public interest magazine journalism. Still more prizes are distributed for electronic journalism, feature journalism, children and families journalism, disability journalism, science journalism, international journalism, political writing, intrepid journalism, excellence in journalism, journalism done using social science research methods, data journalism, and journalism that unmasks corruption. Works-in-progress have a special prize, as do works that address social justice, or advance ethical reporting (actually there are two of these) And a slew of trophies go to practitioners of investigative journalism (Worth Bingham, Goldsmith, Selden Ring, Daniel Pearl, Clark Mollenhoff, et al.). Even the American Copy Editors Society distributes “best headlines” prizes each year.

That’s just a short list. Contests celebrating the journalism of food, travel, sports (with separate awards for coverage on each sport!), environment, women and health care exist. Local and regional prizes can be found in profusion. There are student prizes galore, press-club honors, internal company awards and photojournalism awards. Then comes the cataract of the big “name” prizes from the American Society of Magazine Editors, Scripps Howard, the Emmys, the Society of Professional Journalists, duPont-Columbia, the American Society of News Editors, the Overseas Press Club, and the Loebs, which splash down every prize season to replenish newsroom egos. Oh, how we journalists honor ourselves!