Media Navel Gaze: April 21, 2014
The Week Unpeeled
The Pulitzers were announced last week with a real mix of winners for journalism, with Reuters winning for international reporting, The Washington Post for exploratory journalism, the Center for Public Integrity for investigative reporting and The Guardian US and WaPo for public service for their reporting on the classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, no surprise really especially if you followed how that story unfolded and its aftermath but an award that nonetheless did receive some conservative-leaning criticism that a prize would go to coverage of a traitor. Interesting, no award awarded for feature writing, a kinda unusual outcome.
Elsewhere:
- The awards makes it even more interesting to note an obit in The New York Times over the weekend for Adrianna Wadewitz, who deservedly received the profile because of her contributions as a Wikipedia editor (and academic) and who made some 49,000 edits mostly to literature entries and was able to use her scholarly research/background to gain prominence through a new-media channel;
- Stocks rose broadly during the holiday-shortened week, boosted by corporate earnings, with the Dow ending at 16,406;
- Lots of tough talk and big headlines about the Ukraine but it seemed like Cold War scenarios were cooling;
- TIAA-Cref agrees to buy Nuveen for $6.25 billion
- Among the mountain of superlatives, an avalanche killed 12 Sherpas, the worst single-day tragedy;
- Google buys a drone maker
- Veep Biden takes a selfie (way to make it InstaGramp)
- Michael Phelps gets back in the pool; and
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez of beautiful magical realism died.