Landing the Pulitzer

The newspaper industry's often weak embrace of the Web was evident a few weeks ago following the announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners.

The Pulitzers are, of course, one of -- if not the -- most prestigious awards in American journalism, but it was sometimes hard to tell by looking at newspaper Web sites.

Sure, the Web sites for the winning papers carried coverage of the contest, but -- at least initially -- some of those papers failed to capitalize on their Web presence by doing the obvious thing -- linking to archived copies of the the winning entries.

Some of the winning papers did, but when I did a quick check of several of their sites at the end of April, several of those links had disappeared or were no longer easy to find. In a couple of cases, searching for "Pulitzer Prize" and similar variations on their sites failed to provide the link to the archives.

Are newspapers suddenly humble? Hardly. Maybe it doesn't occur to some of them that anyone would want to read the winning pieces again. Or maybe they don't want to "give away" anything in their for-fee archives.

Here's a quick tour of a few Pulitzer-related sites on the Web. Several of them are provided courtesy of readers who kindly tipped me off to URLs I had failed to find in my initial meanderings.

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http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1999/

This is a link to a list of this year's winners. More detailed information is available via links at the bottom of the page, but you must have an Adobe reader to gain access to it.

The archives, history and resource sections provide more information about the Pulitzers and how they came about.

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http://www.cpnet.com/books/docs/pulitzer...

This links to a nice overview of the 1999 winners by the College Press Network. The page provide information and a few links to winners in journalism and in the letters, drama and music categories. ____________________________________________

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/loc...

The Washington Post won the Gold Medal for public service for its five-part series on the high number of police shootings in the District of Columbia. The project, which melded computer-assisted reporting with old-fashioned shoe leather reporting, began with a simple tip that the FBI collected statistics on police shootings but never published them.

The Post does provide -- thank you very much -- a link to its winning series, as well as links to other winners on the Web.

The Gold Medal is the second for The Post. The first was for its now-fabled coverage of Watergate.

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