Internet reporting comes in from the cold with Pulitzer win

It is a shot of respectability for online journalism, as the Huffington Post became the first for-profit website to bag a Pulitzer prize. The award for national reporting went to the site’s senior military corespondent David Wood, for “Beyond the Battlefield”, his 10-part series about wounded US soldiers returning from the front line in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In their citation, the Pulitzer board praised the “riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers” in the series, which took eight months to come to fruition. Mr Wood, who previously worked at Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, said it showed “you can do great journalism on any platform”. For years, he said, he had believed that “deep, thoughtful reporting (was) at risk of being swept away by new media. So it was with great astonishment that when I went to the Huffington Post, they were very encouraging”.

You can do great journalism on any platform. David Wood, Pulitzer Prize winner

For Ariana Huffington, who sold her eponymous creation to AOL last year for $315m, it was a welcome stamp of credibility, and the hope that the Huffington Post can prove itself more than a mere aggregator of other peoples’ work, chasing page-clicks and relying on unpaid bloggers to do the grunt-work. Last month, a group of bloggers lost a legal bid to seek more than $100m for their work on the Huffington Post, after the judge said no-one had forced them to submit their pieces for publication.

But although unpaid writers are still a mainstay of the HuffPost’s staff, it has managed to recruit a raft of experienced, talented staff, many of them well known names from the conventional media, to back up their commitment to serious reporting. Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, told the site: “The Pulitzer might say ‘welcome to the club’, but the bid for membership started a while ago.”

Cartoon capers

Another mainly online publication, the Washington-based Politico, was also honoured with its first-ever Pulitzer. Cartoonist Matt Wuerker, who’s been with the site since its launch five years ago, won for “his consistently fresh, funny cartoons, especially memorable for lampooning the partisan conflict that engulfed Washington”. Editor-in-chief John Harris told staff that the prize was emblematic of the true spirit of Politico: “Covering politics and telling the story of politics should be a hell of a lot of fun.”

The Pulitzer board only allowed online organisations to become eligible in 2009: honouring the not-for-profit investigative site ProPublica in 2001 for its collaboration with Time Magazine, and again in 2011. But for the often-derided Huffington Post, which claims it has a 35-million-strong audience around the world, it represents an important breakthrough: new media scooping its old media rivals with some old-fashioned reporting.

Huffington Post began life as an attempt to create a more left-wing, considered alternative to the Drudge Report, with a stable of “celebrity bloggers” and a budget of just $2m. But it swiftly became clear that Ariana Huffington had tapped into a new thirst for interactivity: social media was able to provide a unique forum of engagement between journalists and their readers: watercooler conversations were being conducted online.

Business model

With no pricey printing presses or a physical distribution network, Huffington Post was far cheaper to run than newspapers, especially as the bulk of its content were articles gathered from a myriad of other sources, which had invested the time and resources into breaking stories and carrying out investigations. Struggling newspapers weren’t short on derision: the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief, Robert Thomson, described HuffPost as “Tech tapeworms”.

Today’s award could signal a blurring of the boundaries between old and new media, not just for the Huffington Post, with its roster of seasoned talent, but for the very idea that proper journalism is worth investing in, and worth honouring, wherever it appears. Whether or not the precarious economics of the internet will continue to support it, is a matter, perhaps, for another investigation.

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News