Pulitzers Show Local Newspapers’ Decline; Join the Ride of Silence on Wednesday–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: May 13, 2024

Indy Digest: May 13, 2024

A week ago, Columbia University announced this year’s Pulitzer Prizes. Per usual, the awards honored a lot of amazing, impactful journalism, done by the newspapers you’d expect—The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, etc.

But look a little closer, and you’ll see a lot of indicators showing that the journalism world is very different in 2024 than it was just a handful of years ago. Joshua Benton, of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, notes:

The list of honorees … highlighted three major ongoing shifts in American journalism:

• The best works of journalism are increasingly produced by just a few high-end institutions.

• The decline in local and regional newspapers has pushed online-native outlets to the forefront.

• The work historically performed by newspapers is increasingly done by other forms of media.

To state the obvious: Duh. None of those is a flashy new trend for 2024; they’ve each been in progress for at least two decades. But we’ve never seen a Pulitzers announcement like yesterday, when more online-native outlets (12) were honored than newspapers (8).

The Pulitzers are an annual opportunity for journalism to reflect on its best work—and who is producing it. Between my years in newspapers and here at Nieman Lab, I’ve now seen 27 Pulitzer announcement cycles—and this year’s batch of honorees is different.

I am pretty darned plugged into the journalism world, and I was surprised to see that a media outlet I’d never even heard of, the Invisible Institute, won two Pulitzers, for Local Reporting and Audio Reporting. The Invisible Institute is “a nonprofit journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago” that works to “enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable.” It’s definitely on my radar screen now.

Anyway, back to Benton’s analysis of how this year’s Pulitzers were different. He looked back 20 years at the 2004 list of winners and finalists. “Those included a wide range of dailies in metro and local markets, like Philadelphia, Providence, Seattle, Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Dallas, San Jose, Minneapolis, Baltimore—even Toledo, Ohio, and White Plains, N.Y. Outside newspapers, the only other finalists came from five wire services (AP, Reuters, Getty, Copley, and Universal Press Syndicate).”

This year? “Collectively, (newspapers) produced 21 Pulitzer finalists. But a whopping 14 of those came from either The New York Times (8) or The Washington Post (6)—leaving just 7 from all other newspapers combined. The national newspapers are in an entirely different business these days from the rest of the industry.” 

One problem is that so many newspapers these days are owned by companies, like Alden and Gannett, that only care about profits, not journalism. A couple of weeks ago, the Poynter Institute reported on the fact that Gannett—the parent company of The Desert Sun—had quietly walked back a pledge to add journalists to its newspapers that “have been languishing with one or no locally based journalists as more profitable metros get attention and resources.”

No matter how often I hear about longstanding Gannett newspapers in not-tiny places like Ithaca, N.Y. and Salinas, Calif., with one or zero reporters, it still seems unfathomable.

But that’s the state of corporate journalism in 2024—and our country is suffering because of it.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Local bicyclists and others are being encouraged to join the annual ride of silence to promote bicycle safety, at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 15, at Ruth Hardy Park in Palm Springs. According to the event’s page on Facebook: “We will gather at the south parking area, with brief comments from community leaders and elected officials. This year we will have great support from the ALC Desert Roadrunners, Friends of CV/Link, Volunteer Palm Springs, clubs and the city of Palm Springs. The great Volunteer Palm Springs will again bring a ghost bike to memorialize friends we have lost. All levels of bicyclists are encouraged to join this effort to raise public awareness of cycling safety, and to honor those we’ve lost and those who have been injured. We also encourage non-cyclists to join us. Walkers can use the one-mile loop around the park, and all can show support by joining us at the brief ceremony. … The Ride of Silence rolls at 7 p.m. local time around the globe. The organization’s rules are simple: We will all wear helmets, stay under 12 miles per hour, not speak, and follow all laws. Our route is less than 5 miles with the option of stopping sooner.”

• Our partners at CalMatters report that California Highway Patrol officers apparently violated state policies while dispersing protesters at UCLA last week: “Just before 4 o’clock on Thursday morning, three CHP Special Response Teams with batons formed a skirmish line outside Royce Hall at UCLA. Some officers behind and next to them carried shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds or 40mm launchers with sponge rounds, less-lethal munitions referred to as a ‘pain compliance device’ by its manufacturer. A review of CalMatters video from inside the encampment documented at least 25 instances in which those officers appeared to aim their weapons at the eye level of protesters or fired them into crowds that didn’t appear to present an immediate threat to life or serious injury. … Law enforcement officers across the state are trained that these types of munitions ‘shall not be aimed at the head, neck or any other vital organs,’ according to guidelines from California Commission on Peace of Officers and Standards Training. … In response to CalMatters’ questions, CHP Director of Communications Jamie Coffee said that officers did indeed face a threat from protesters. Protesters do not appear to attack or threaten the CHP officers in the videos recorded by CalMatters.”

• The San Francisco Chronicle (subscription required) reports on the woes of the California wine industry: “The entire $55 billion California wine industry is, like the wine industry worldwide, experiencing an unprecedented downturn now. No sector is immune—not the luxury tier, not the big conglomerates, not the upstart natural wines. Wine consumption fell 8.7% in 2023, according to leading industry analyst the Gomberg Fredrikson Report, a sobering reversal for an industry that had, for a quarter-century, taken annual growth for granted. This year could be the breaking point, with many industry figures predicting ‘a good-sized housecleaning,’ as put by Ian Brand, owner of I. Brand & Family Winery in Monterey County. … After decades of unfettered growth beginning in the 1990s, wine consumption started to flatten around 2018. Now, following what appeared to be a spike during the pandemic, it’s in dramatic decline.” (If you don’t have a Chronicle subscription, this KTVU piece is readable for free.)

• Chocolate and other cocoa products may soon be more expensive. The New York Times explains why: “For much of the past decade, the price of cocoa in one key global benchmark hovered around $2,500 per metric ton. Last year, after poor harvests in West Africa, the price began to creep up—rising to $4,200 a ton by December, a threshold that hadn’t been crossed since the 1970s. Then the financial speculators began to pile in—betting prices would rise further. They pushed the price above $6,000 a ton in February, $9,000 a ton in March and $11,000 a ton in mid-April. Since then, the price has swung wildly, falling nearly 30 percent in just two weeks before bouncing up again. By Thursday, the price was $8,699 a ton. Large food companies have been raising prices and warning that they’ll have to continue to do so if cocoa doesn’t stabilize. Companies that use more pure cocoa—rather than the palm oil and other fillers that go into many candy bars—will be hit hardest, though some premium chocolate makers note that they’ve always paid much higher prices in order to compensate farmers fairly..”

• Is there any hope of decreasing the extreme political polarization in the United States? Two researchers, writing for The Conversation, think there is: “Based on our research … earlier generations—the Silents, baby boomers and Gen X – are more divided than millennials and Gen Z. We expect that in the future, highly partisan members of the Silent, boomer and Gen X generations will exit and no longer be part of American political life. They will be replaced by millennials and Gen Zers, who are less likely to define themselves as strong Republicans or Democrats. The greater consensus among young people today may lessen polarization.”

• And finally … this short story, from The Associated Press, is on the AP’s “oddities” page—but it actually paints a rather interesting picture about the fragile nature of the agriculture industry in the U.S. It involves a tractor-trailer hauling 15 million honeybees overturning on a freeway in Maine: “First responders didn’t realize the cargo was bees until firefighters went down an embankment to check for leaking fluids, said Fire Chief Travis Leary. They learned the hard way. ‘The guys did get stung on a regular basis. Everyone got stung at least a couple of times,’ said Leary, who suffered several bee stings. The temperature in the 40s might have kept the bees from getting rowdier during the several hours it took to get the truck upright and removed by a tow truck, he said. A beekeeper was summoned to corral the bees, he added. The truckload of bees was headed to Washington County, which is the center of the state’s wild blueberry industry. Bees are routinely trucked into the region to pollinate the blueberry barrens each spring.”

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