WSJ, AP both should have won Pulitzer for oil spill coverage

Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes that either the Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press should have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for their coverage of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Achenbach writes, “I should note that the Journal didn’t go unacknowledged: Its oil spill coverage was a finalist in the National News category. The winner in that category was Pro Publica, for coverage of Wall Street shenanigans (by the way, over on the arts and letters side of things, when will the P’s give Michael Lewis the prize he’s earned more than once?). But unless the Journal somehow botched its entry and forgot to include its best work, I find it hard to believe that the board could have looked at the Journal’s package of coverage and concluded that it wasn’t worthy of a Pulitzer in some category.

“I suspect the real problem is that the breaking news category stipulates that the work be ‘local.’ Why make that stiipulation? There’s already a separate category for Local News.

“The Journal was very good in its coverage early and often, with superior enterprise pieces that were the first to lay out precisely what went wrong on the terrible night of April 20, 2010, as shown in company documents and emails. That work, by Ben Casselman, Russell Gold and other WSJ staffers, set the standard for every reconstruction story that followed.

“And let’s not forget the AP: It was on top of the story from the get-go and never let up. Along the way, the AP had a terrific enterprise piece on the abandoned wells that continue to pose a spill hazard. For its oil spill coverage, the AP won a George Polk Award.”

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