Every year, Nigel Jaquiss gets calls from college students who want to talk to him about his Pulitzer Prize for their class projects.
It's been more than a decade since he won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting, but he likes that people are still interested.
So when University of Missouri senior Kelsi Anderson called, Jaquiss shared the story of his reporting with her, like he always does. But Anderson went much deeper.
They spoke for an hour and a half. She had detailed, tough questions. She was diligent with fact checks. She produced a podcast. She wrote a Q&A. And she spent time on something many students often gloss over — the impact of Jaquiss' work on the community.
Anderson's work is part of a larger project that launched Tuesday by a class of senior journalism students at Mizzou. "No Small Pulitzer" looks into 17 Pulitzer wins by newspapers with a circulation of 100,000 or less in the last 25 years. The students spent the semester on the project, and some of what they found surprised them, including:
- The digital revolution hasn't changed all that much about really good journalism.
- Pulitzer winners are pretty normal folks.
- You can do big things at small places.
Digital
hasn't changed everything
Jacqui
Banaszynski, a professor, Pulitzer-winner and
a Poynter editing fellow,
knows her students are entering a different era of journalism, and she wants
them to see the possibilities in front of them, as well as the challenges.
So
at the start of class, she split her 11 students into groups and offered them
three ideas for a class project: reporting hidden stories, the press and
presidential politics, and, in time for the Pulitzer Prizes' 100th year, what
journalists can learn from past winners.
The
class picked the Pulitzer theme, then they got more specific. They decided to
stay within the digital age, so they went back as far as 1991. And they looked
into the work of smaller newsrooms, limiting winners to circulation of 100,000
or less at the time of the win.
They
started with a spreadsheet, said student and project leader Anne Marie Hankins,
and went through every winner of every year to find their sources. Everyone
signed up to interview winners, and each member took on a role in shaping the
project as a whole, from design to storytelling to social promotion.
But
one of the big lessons they learned is also one of the oldest.
"After
talking to these people, I think a lot of us realized a lot of the principles
and processes that make up great work remain exactly the same as before the
internet came about," Hankins said.
"Good
journalism has been good journalism and it will be good journalism,"
Anderson agreed. "That idea hasn't changed, but the way that we get that
to the community has changed."
In
2004, while Jaquiss was working on an investigation into a former governor's
sexual abuse of a minor, he learned that the person he was investigating was
going to the Oregonian to confess. This happened on a Thursday, but Willamette
Week only publishes on Wednesdays. For the first time, Willamette Week decided
to publish breaking news online.
The
internet helped Willamette Week break the story he'd been working on, and he
was the first investigative reporting winner to win for a story first published
online.
The
digital era has also helped smaller places get bigger audiences, said student
Thomas Friestad. Stories that resonate within a specific community, such as The
Colorado Springs Gazette's coverage of veterans, also resonate in other communities.
"Regardless
of the fact that we're very much into the digital age of journalism, if you
really dig down deep and look at any project, the process and the skills,
really everything, you dig down to it, it's all the same," said student
Jacob Scholl.
Small
market, big impact
Another
lesson the class learned, Banaszynski said, "masthead is not
destiny."
"This
kind of work still makes a difference, and it probably makes a more tangible
difference in smaller communities," she said. "I really wanted them
to see that the work that you do is essential to these communities, but you need
to honor the story that you find where you find it."
Friestad,
who hopes to move back home to the Washington, D.C. area and cover politics,
got that message. Now, he said, he'll be much more willing to accept a job at a
smaller publication.
Sean
Roberts already knew the value of a local paper. She's from Liberty, Missouri,
and while no one at the Liberty Tribune has won a Pulitzer yet, she grew up
delivering the newspaper and seeing what it meant to the community.
For
her, the project was a lesson in what a small group of people can do together
when they're excited about the same thing. They learn from each other. They
bring out each other's strengths. That, she said, will benefit all of them as
they move into their careers, most likely in smaller publications.
And
that work, Hankins said, matters, too, in the communities where it's done. It's
valuable to have journalists who live and work there. The work of winners from
"No Small Pulitzer" benefits journalism as an industry, too, she
said.
"In
the wake of such a tumultuous year and a half when the press has become a huge
target for people that are unhappy with some of the ways that things are going,
I think it's important to remind people of that aspect of journalism."
The
surprisingly normal lives of Pulitzer winners
Even
though they had a Pulitzer-winner guiding the project, many of the students
still felt intimidated about calling winners.
"You
think, 'I've got to call this Pulitzer-winner and interview them,'"
Anderson said. "Are they gonna think I'm an idiot because I'm a beginning
reporter?"
They
did not.
The
students found that the sources for their project didn't have meetings to plot
out Pulitzer projects. They were too busy covering their communities.
"Nobody
sets out to win Pulitzers, nobody's like, I'm gonna win a Pulitzer," said
student Vera Tan. "Maybe people do at the bigger papers, but in these
smaller papers where their main purpose is to inform their local community, all
they're doing is just their jobs. They're just wanting to write the stories
that need to be told."
Tan
helped build the site and, like many in the class, said learning to work as a
team was a big takeaway. Many of the students also shared the lessons their
subjects shared with them.
"He
said he thinks that this culture of social media and instant opining creates
the perception that journalists need to have a fully formed opinion about
everything at any time," she said.
But
we don't have the answers and we shouldn't pretend to, Tan was reminded.
"That's
why we're journalists."
They
also spoke about them in class with Banaszynski. This semester, she watched her
class learn that Pulitzer-winning journalists are real people who get up and
get to work every day.
"They're
not riding some winged beast that's labeled 'Pulitzer' and riding around the
universe drinking Black Label."
Good
news in bad times
One
thing really struck Anderson about her hour and a half talk with Jaquiss.
He
told her that in 2004, before he wrote his investigation, he felt like he was
in a rut at Willamette Week. He had all but decided to leave.
"He
worried that he was doing good work but being at a small paper meant it
wouldn't be able to have as big of an effect," Anderson said.
Then,
his reporting uncovered sexual abuse by the former governor, and his work sent
the state into a frenzy. Doing that work changed his mind about where he was.
Today,
he's still there.
Journalism
students are facing a vastly different landscape than they did even in 2004,
when Jaquiss wrote his Pulitzer-winning story. There are less journalists, less
jobs.
But
there's still a big country full of stories in small- and medium-sized cities,
he said. Technology means that the work of those small places can reach much
farther and live much longer. And the way that Anderson and her classmates have
learned to tell stories, not just through words and images but social media,
audio and digital, makes that work more accessible to more people.
"I
think it's really helpful for them to understand that you can have an impact at
a small publication, that you can produce journalism that makes a difference
without having big-city resources," he said. "I think that's a really
powerful lesson because it's a pretty dismal time."
 |
| The MU class that produced "No Small Pulitzer". (Photo via Jacqui Banaszynski) |
(reprinted from the Poynter Institute)
Kristen Hare
covers the media for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her
a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri's
School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an
assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a
staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis
Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America.
Hare and her family live outside Tampa.
