Journalism as a Conversation

Author’s note: This is one in a series of occasional posts about a study I’m doing on the conversational news practices of The Seattle Times in its winner for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

Somewhere between the glasses of wine and my whining one Saturday night about the lack of practical applications for much academic research, Albert * hit on what would be my first follow-up study to the dissertation: a case study of conversational journalism in The Seattle Times’ winner for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

On the Sunday morning of Thanksgiving Day weekend last year, a deranged ex-con opened fire on four sheriff’s deputies in a Lakewood, Wash. coffee shop. Coverage of the ensuing manhunt for Maurice Clemmons, burial of the deputies and investigations into Clemmons’ slips through the criminal-justice system earned The Times the Big Prize. In many ways, the paper came of age in that coverage, using myriad collaborative Web tools to tell the story, from Twitter to Google Wave.

In the months ahead, I’ll be looking at the coverage through the prism of my doctoral research, looking for hits and misses with the experimental data and lessons learned. But before I could proceed, I needed to talk to the chair of the nominating jury for the breaking news Pulitzer, Felice Belman (pictured above), editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. I knew going in that if The Seattle Times’ social-media practices in anyway hurt its Pulitzer entry, my study could be toast.

As it turned out, jurors found the paper’s print and online coverage together earned it the Big Prize, Belman said. Though jurors didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the Times’ use of social media, she said, “I thought it was a cool use of resources. It seemed like it helped them … but it wasn’t a deciding factor. It was like, boy, they are using every tool available to the them, and they’ve got the resources.”

Jurors decided as a group to first look at print coverage, then Web coverage for each Pulitzer entry. In the case of Seattle, she said, they mostly looked at print. 

“I was impressed with what they did with multimedia. … We were just thinking, ‘That was smart.’”

Belman said many of the competing entries had Internet components, including Twitter. But that didn’t serve some newspapers well because it also revealed critical errors in the haste to be first with a story.

“There was one entry. They were so proud of speed that they thought we’d discount inaccuracy,” she said. “Speed isn’t the only virtue.” The Seattle Times stood out for its breadth and pace of reporting without making a lot of mistakes, she said.

On the question of conversational journalism, or co-created news between professional journalists and citizens, Belman rightly noted newsrooms are still feeling their way.

“It works in some cases and not others. … [But] I kind of think, why not try that sort of thing?”

* The man deserves a special husband Pulitzer for putting up with my daily nerd shit.