April 20, 2010
By
Alison Loat
Last week, online news may have officially entered the mainstream when the non-profit investigative newsroom, ProPublica, won a Pulitzer Prize for its piece on the controversial deaths in a New Orleans hospital following Hurrican Katrina.
Although ProPublica collaborates with mainstream news organizations to syndicate its work, this marks the first time a news organization that operates solely online has won this prestigious journalism honour. The two other online winners, SFGate for cartoons and PolitiFact for its 2008 election coverage, are both affiliated with newspapers.
ProPublica, founded in 2008, is still a start-up. In March their founder and CEO, Paul Steiger, was in Toronto talking about the challenges they faced in their early days (one of the easier ones was sorting through the massive number of applications from people wanting to work there, including 16 previous Pulitzer Prize winners).
He also talked about the challenges they're facing now, including how to take greater advantage of new media (they recently hired the former director of OffTheBus, a collaborative journalism project, from the Huffington Post), improve their own website and diversify their funding.
But why believe me? You can watch edited highlights from Mr. Steiger's lecture and the Q&A here.
LABELS:
journalism, media, ProPublica
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