Last week, the Washington Post notched another three Pulitzer Prizes. Good for the hometown paper. Not so good for the rest of journalism.

That the Post, which announced the awards on its own front page alongside a somewhat self-indulgent photo of staffers in their own newsroom, was honored with journalism’s most prestigious award is not news. It would have been more newsworthy if the outlet—one of the biggest and most well-resourced newspapers in the country—had been snubbed this year.

But what is newsworthy about this year’s Pulitzer Prizes is what the list of awardees says about the state of journalism—especially when it comes to local and regional reporting. This year continues the trend of the past few Pulitzer seasons, which have been consistently dominated by the biggest outlets.

The Post, the New York Times, ProPublica (congrats to former WCP contributor Joshua Kaplan!), LA Times, the New Yorker, Reuters, and Associated Press absolutely dominated the awards this year, winning 12 of the 15 journalism categories. Many of these outlets have hundreds, even thousands, of reporters on hand and teams dedicated to long-form journalism that tends to impress the Pulitzer committee.

Only Lookout Santa Cruz, a digital publication that didn’t even exist five years ago, beat out the biggest outlets in the country with the award for its breaking coverage of flooding and mudslides. And the Invisible Institute, which has about 20 people on staff, managed to win two Pulitzers for local reporting (in collaboration with City Bureau) and audio reporting (in collaboration with USG Audio).

Years ago, the Pulitzer Prizes were an opportunity to spotlight the very best reporting and writing from around the country. Awards routinely went to outlets in small and medium-size towns.

The Las Vegas Sun, the Toledo Blade, the White Plains Journal News, the Miami Herald, and the Dallas Morning News all racked up awards—a snapshot of great journalism from around the country. The big papers always had a leg up, but small and midsize newspapers could (and did) compete if they had a good story and covered it with determination, energy, and flair.

The tiny Rocky Mountain News, for example, won two Pulitzers, in 2000 and 2003, for its photographs of the shooting at Columbine High School and of Colorado wildfires, respectively.

Alt-weeklies have been recognized as well, with Portland, Oregon’s Nigel Jaquiss winning the 2005 award for investigative journalism for Willamette Week’s exposure of a former governor’s sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl. The Stranger’s Eli Sanders won the 2012 award for feature writing for his report on a woman’s courtroom testimony about the horrific rape and murder of her partner in their home.

The last really great year for outlets not named the Post or Times came in 2014. Winners included the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Detroit Free Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Tampa Bay Times, the Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), the Boston Globe, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Charlotte Observer.

But those days seem distant after this year’s concentration of winners among the big media outlets—a trend that is unlikely to change anytime soon. 

In a recent episode of the podcast Search Engine, host PJ Vogt spoke with Times columnist Ezra Klein about the “media apocalypse.” The conversation was sparked in part by Klein’s column following the announcement that staffers at the beloved music site Pitchfork were being laid off as the outlet was being folded into GQ.

“What’s failing here isn’t a particular editorial strategy,” Klein writes. “It’s that the middle is collapsing in journalism.” He points out that once-robust and successful outlets—the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, BuzzFeed News, Vice, Sports Illustrated, HuffPost, Jezebel, old and new Gawker—have either shut down completely or significantly pared back their operations to the point where they are no longer recognizable.

Klein explains on the podcast that the Sun, the LA Times, and the Dallas Morning News didn’t previously compete directly with the New York Times for readers.

“The key thing happening right now is all of the general interest players are in competition with each other,” Klein says on the pod. “And that’s going to have a natural effect of if you’re only going to subscribe to one large news bundle, you’re going to subscribe to the largest news bundle.”

“The small things are surviving … and the huge battleships like the New York Times are surviving and everything in the middle is getting crushed,” Vogt adds.

That’s a disaster, as Klein points out in his column: “The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications, and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.”

I asked the notoriously opaque Pulitzer Prize Board about entries from smaller media outlets across categories, but it declined to provide any data that would reflect the range of entries among those outlets compared with large regional outlets or national ones.

Sean Murphy, with the Pulitzer Administrator’s office, says there were 1,200 journalism entries, but would not say how many are in each category or share specifics on the organizations that submitted their work. He does note that within the “local reporting” and “commentary” categories, about 25 to 30 percent of the submissions are from regional and smaller media outlets.

But without knowing how the Pulitzer Prize Board defines a regional paper, this statistic is useless. And the Pulitzer media contacts refuse to provide any hard data on either submissions or news outlet size.

Further complicating the ambitions of smaller news orgs is that their most talented journalists eventually graduate to larger publications with more resources and better pay. This phenomenon is also not necessarily new. The cream of the crop rises to the top, as they say. But it becomes harder for small outlets with fewer resources to create news coverage of distinction when their most skilled writers leave just as they start to develop their own voice.

For example, the Post’s winning entry in the category for national reporting tells the story of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and how it has been frequently used in mass shootings around the country. It’s an incredible piece of journalism told in an unconventional way.

The series was anchored by Silvia Foster-Frau, who did impressive work for the San Antonio Express-News before joining the Post just a few years ago.

These days, the industry looks a bit like the NBA, where the most talented and coveted journalists move between teams that can offer the most pay and prestige. Meanwhile, small and medium-size outlets throughout the country continue to close up shop. D.C. needs no reminder of this carnage.

The Post’s win for its 15 stories on gun violence came alongside awards for editorials—a notable accomplishment for the Editorial Page editor David Shipley. Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been confined in a Russian prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine since 2022, won the prize for commentary.

David Hoffman also won for a series of editorials on how technology is being used by corrupt governments against their own citizens.

In the end, there is no single solution for changing the way awards are distributed. A tiered system, like weight classes for boxers, could help level the field. But would an award mean as much if you’re not competing against the best and biggest?

And there will remain critics who think the entire award process is overblown anyway. For most readers, the Pulitzer is not a determining factor in whether they read the Post versus the Times versus, say, a small digital outlet. Most folks outside of journalism care very little about journalism awards.

On the other hand, readers might cancel their subscriptions to the paper that changes the way it covers high school sports, writes fewer stories about local government, or seems absurdly out of step with local issues on their editorial page.

Media power has been consolidating at a smaller number of outlets, even as the total number of outlets where people share news is growing. Substacks, blogs, and even social media platforms news sharing sometimes provide the perception of lots of news voices in the woods, while the actual number of organizations is shrinking.

According to a November 2023 report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, at the current rate, by the end of 2024, the U.S. will have just one third of the newspapers it did in 2005.

The Medill report says more than half of the counties in the U.S. “have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local source.” In fact, 204 counties have no local news outlet, and another 1,562 have only one remaining source of local news.

The best way to combat that is to invest in news gathering and—as we often do when buying eggs, vegetables, or Christmas trees—buy and invest locally.
“If you want local news to exist, you have to subscribe to local news, and read it and spend time there,” Klein says on the podcast. “You have to make it vibrant by your presence and by your decisions.”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with the correct spelling Silvia Foster-Frau’s name.