Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog
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Sunday, May 3, 2009
 


Pearls Before Swine

Swine flu strikes the downsized newsroom
Unrelated to the "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip above -- also not to be confused with the wonderful Pearls Before Breakfast, which I use as an example of break-the-rules storytelling in newswriting class. This one is a horror story about the meeting of two pandemics, a fable of uncertain authorship published by the LA Observed Web site last week.
 
Lessons from St. Pete...
And, finally, the good news... The executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times extracts some lessons from the day his paper won two Pulitzer Prizes...

Editor Neil Brown's short list:
  1. Newspapers can innovate.
  2. Internet versus print? It's a false choice.
  3. Despite cutting costs, we still do meaningful work.
  4. Powerful stories move us and unite us.
Brown doesn't just point to the Pulitzers in that column. In the same "crowded hour" of the award announcement last month, a powerful Florida politician was being indicted by a grand jury, based on another St. Petersburg Times story, while yet another investigative project - - on abuse at a reform school - - was being posted on the paper's TampaBay.com site.

The Web also played a big part in those Pulitzers -- one for the paper's PolitiFact.com election coverage and online database, the other for a simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming story about a horribly neglected girl and the adoptive parents who changed her life. That story, a long-form journalistic narrative titled "The Girl in the Window," is probably most read story the Times has produced, Brown said, estimating it has had well over a million readers in print and online.

(I posted more links about the Pulitzer winners last month.)

2:30:09 PM    


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