April 16, 2007 - Columbia News - Columbia University

TheRecord APRIL 16, 2007 3TALK OF THE CAMPUSPulitzersGet WiredBy Melanie A. FarmerThe Internet is changing the news business. It’s changing thePulitzer Prizes, too.When this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism are announced onApril 16, some of them probably will go to newspapers whose entriesincluded Web stories, online photo galleries, streaming videos, interactivegraphics or databases.In a rapidly changing media world where veteran news providersare inking deals with Internet publications, it makes sense that thisyear the Pulitzer Prize Board is including more of a newspaper-Internet mix in nearly all 14 of its journalism prize categories.It was an inevitable move, reflecting the seismic changes acrossjournalism. Most newspapers now have significant online sites withmaterial that doesn’t appear in the papers themselves, and they providesuch untraditional newspaper features as video. Newspapershave been adding to their Web offerings, as Dow Jones & Co. (whichowns The Wall Street Journal) did with its purchase ofMarketWatch.com in 2004. It isn’t just newspapers, either. TV newsgiants like CBS and NBC are moving deeper online, most recentlystriking content deals with nascent Net video pioneer YouTube.“Newspapers are a hybrid these days,” said Sig Gissler, administratorof the prizes. “There is a blended news presentation, partly in paper,partly online. Publications are offering a richer mix for their audience.We’re trying to capture that blend in the Pulitzer competition.”This year’s move isn’t the first to include Internet entries, althoughit goes much further than the board’s past changes. Last year, theboard allowed online content in all journalism categories, but limitedART SPIEGELMANit to written stories or still images. And since 1999, the board hasaccepted online materials for the Public Service category only. Thisproved to be a boon for last year’s winners in that category, TheTimes-Picayune and The Sun Herald (Biloxi-Gulfport), which sharedthe prize for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Both papers didmuch of their initial coverage on their Web sites.Under the new rules, online material of all kinds is permitted in allcategories except Breaking News Photography and FeaturePhotography, which are limited to still images. Newspapers can submitentries that consist entirely of online material only in theBreaking News Reporting and Breaking News Photography categories.In all other categories, entries may contain online elements butmust include material published in a newspaper’s print edition.Gissler also noted that animation has begun to appear in cartooningentries. In a separate category shift effective this year, the PulitzerBoard replaced the Beat Reporting category with Local Reporting.The idea behind this move, Gissler said, is that the lifeblood ofnewspapers remains their ability to report on local issues and people.“It was good to have a category clearly emphasizing local reporting,”he added.Local Reporting ended up being one of the more robust categories.The Pulitzer Board received a total of 156 entries for Local Reporting,second only to Commentary. The work of beat reporters can still gointo national, investigative and explanatory reporting categories.As the industry continues to morph, so will the prize rules and regulations.“We are a pacesetter and are constantly trying to have ablend that really reflects what the industry is doing,” said Gissler.Asked if online-only publications such as Slate.com or Salon.com willever be contenders for the coveted prizes, Gissler noted that newspapersare the prizes’ historic mission, but added, “Who knows whatcould happen? We’ll be watching this and refining this as time goes on.”The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced at a press conference atColumbia’s Graduate School of Journalism on April 16. In May, an annualluncheon honoring this year’s recipients will take place in Low Library.SCOTT HUGCOMICS AS CLASSROOM CANON FODDERBy Dan Riverort Spiegelman confesses he owes his intellect tocomics. He learned about good and evil throughBatman, economics through Donald Duck,philosophy from Peanuts, aesthetics from Madmagazine, and feminism through Little Lulu.Today, he is the New York City Fellow in the Humanitieswith Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities anda visiting lecturer through the American StudiesDepartment.Forbidden to smoke inside Low Library, Spiegelmanclenched his pipe and fixed it in his mouth a few timesbefore delivering a talk entitled “Marching into the“Spiegelman is a scholar whoknows everything about his artform but also wants to pass thaton to his students.”Canon” to a crowded room in the Rotunda on April 9.Using a PowerPoint presentation and an unscriptedlecture, Spiegelman took the audience on a historical viewof comics—from the “crime against American children”decried by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his book“Seduction of the Innocent” in the early 20th century,through the comic book burnings and Senate hearings inthe 1950s, to the current celebration of the form asmuseum art and literature, suitable for academic inquiry.As comics get lost or abandoned by the current state ofmass media, he said, “they have to reinvent themselves asartists and enter academia, museums, and libraries.”Spiegelman famously ended his decade-long stint at TheNew Yorker shortly after the September 11 attacks as aprotest against what he called a timid and conservativemedia. On April 9, he declared that once again he has puthis work on hiatus; this time it was to immerse himself inthe seminar he teaches at Columbia.Every Thursday, Spiegelman teaches 14 students in hisSoHo studio. Using the Masters of American Comics show—a museum exhibition that traveled around the country,the first to examine comic strips and books on anexpansive scale—as a point of departure and as a point forcontention, the course studies 15 exhibited cartoonists intheir historical context, and analyzes the work of otherartists in their extended circles. Despite the sociologicaland historical through-line of the seminar, primary focus isplaced on the artists’ aesthetic and formal achievements.Apologizing to Nobel Laureate and Columbia neuroscienceprofessor Eric Kandel—an expert on brainprocesses—Spiegelman said that in his world, brainprocesses are dominated by images. He said that the combinationof those images and their placement on a comicspage tells a narrative much like the pace and rhythm thatsheet music provides to a listener.In 1992, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for his memoirin the form of a graphic novel, Maus, which recountshis father’s struggle to survive the Holocaust as a PolishJew. It follows the author’s troubled relationship with hisfather and the way the effects of war reverberate throughgenerations. In it, the Nazis are portrayed as cats and Jewsas mice.Andrew Delbanco, director of the American Studiesprogram, introduced Spiegelman and praised him assomeone who is engaged in creation. “Art Spiegelman is ascholar who knows everything about his art form but alsowants to pass that on to his students.”