Wordblog

The Pulitzer Prizes are pernicious and chasing them distracts newspapers from their real challenge of engaging a readership that is drifting off to TV and the internet. That anyway is the view of Gawker’s Nick Denton.

Pulitzers “won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines.” The British Press Awards on the other hand are “lacking in respectability” but,

…the British newspaper industry is in much more robust health. To be sure, circulations are in gradual decline. And standards of journalism are as sloppy as ever. But newspapers such as The Guardian have a much greater share of the online audience than their American counterparts. And the papers, while lacking much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers, are way livelier.

The connection? The respect of peers is a luxury that US newspapers have enjoyed because, for much of the second half of the 20th century, they were local monopolies. They could afford to be respectable, because they didn’t need to pander to readers. In the UK, by contrast, 12 national dailies are in vicious competition. Editors fear the loss of their jobs, not their honor.

Would that be the sort of competition which has led the Daily Star to make three high profile apologies in the past three weeks?