The Times-Picayune and Nola.com — former colleagues, all — have been doing a spectacular job using the web to get their news out because they no longer had presses and trucks and newsstands… and a city. This morning on On the Media, I listened to a good interview with T-P Editor Jim Amos, who said that blogging was absolutely essential to delivering the news. Rex Hammock says they deserve a Pulitzer for their breaking news blog.
I agree. The Pulitzer committee would do journalism well to separate the content from the container, the medium from the message, and recognize good journalism wherever and however it happens.
It’s a helluva hard way to discover the full value of the web (and not a little ironic for me), but the Times-Picayune has done it. And it’s not about PDFs and fancy formatting. The stories are fed into a simple weblog. Get that RSS feed and you will find great reporting from the biggest story there is.
