“Relative advantages”

This is non-sense: “The NE is doing what all competitive organizations do: it’s exploiting its relative advantages.” The Enquirer and the Times are not “competitive organizations” when it comes to public affairs reporting. Their aims are different (titillation versus service), and they don’t shared the same fundamental practices (paying sources versus not).

Also: can someone please tell me what public interest was served by breaking the Edwards scandal? The man was already out of the presidential race when the big confirming scoops came. He was a has-been. It’d be like Nixon or Clinton or Spitzer getting busted AFTER leaving office. It’s interesting, but not really gonna impact the public good.

Print v. Print

• The Pulitzer Committee has already ruled on the newspaper/magazine issue.
• The NE is in the running in the categories “Investigative Reporting” and “National News Reporting.”
• The NE’s reporting on Edwards began in 2007 and continued well into 2009, with the stories getting increasingly substantial and newsworthy.

What’s left is the issue of how significant is its reporting on a “private citizen.” With the very likely prospect of a criminal investigation, I thank that answers itself.

Bottom line: I’m not arguing that the NE should win a Pulitzer, but I don’t see anything here that automatically disqualifies it.

Uhmmm…hello?

Clearly, The Enquirer is eligible for the prize.  I read it myself in The National Enquirer.

And I’m pretty sure that photo of Edwards is not doctored.

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/national_enquirer_accepted_pulitzer_prize_competition/celebrity/68188

One point I’m not clear on is whether the Enquirer is entirely eligible for the prize — there are questions about whether the tabloid is technically a magazine or a newspaper, and whether reporting that was done in 2007 and 2008 is eligible for a 2009 contest.

Leaving that aside, though, there’s a part of me that really hopes the Enquirer gets the Pulitzer — or at least a finalist nod. I was in Iowa and New Hampshire more or less constantly in the run-up to those early election contests, and the degree to which the Enquirer was out alone on this story cannot be overstated. The subject of John Edwards’s extramarital appetites was a widely assumed/acknowledged/gossiped-about piece of information among campaign staffers and reporters, and yet no one but this tabloid was doing anything with it. When the first big Enquirer story on Edwards and Rielle Hunter came out, the widely traded joke was that they’d gotten the story wrong — but only in the sense that Hunter was the only woman Edwards wasn’t sleeping with. The rest of the media were too obsessed with covering the election as a horse race that even when the Enquirer got the goods on this widely held assumption — that the haircut from North Carolina had a zipper problem — it never broke into the mainstream coverage. Even the blogs ignored it. The Enquirer was standing alone on this, and that deserves some kind of recognition.

Call me a sticker….

But what about the fact that the Enquirer is a magazine? And the fact that much of their coverage was in 2008? I think that there’s merits to the fact that they spent serious money — not on sources, but on sending a reporter to do lots of on-the-ground-reporting — in a time when most people are reporting from their laptops. And I think a lot of people are happy to stick it to the Pulitzers, which they see as a super clubby, elitist prize awarded by the New York Times to the New York Times. But does that overshadow the very basic requirements for the award: Newspaper reporting in 2009?