Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Chapter 6
Lecture Builders
JEFF BEZOS BUYING THE WASHINGTON POST
I went into more detail on this in the fifth edition. Here’s the story of Bezos buying the
Washington Post:
The news started breaking on Twitter on the afternoon of August 6, 2013, that there was a big
meeting scheduled at the Washington Post. Not long after, word came that Amazon founder and space
memorabilia collector Jeff Bezos had purchased the paper for $250 million from the Graham family, who
had run the paper for four generations. Although Bezos founded and is the largest stockholder in book
sales and media giant Amazon.com, he bought the paper out of his own personal fortune (and with a
fortune estimated at $26 billion, the Post cost less than 1% of his net worth). When Bezos does things,
he doesn’t do them in a small way. As an example, not long before buying the Washington Post, he
funded and led an expedition to recover two of the massive F-1 Saturn V moon rocket engines from the
bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
1
The fact that this is a personal purchase is important. Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi
pointed out at the time of the purchase that under Bezos the paper will be privately owned, so he will
not be accountable to shareholders or other investors. He’ll be allowed to take a long-term approach,
something he has a track record of doing. Although the Post reported being profitable at the time of the
sale, it has been suffering a steady decline in revenue over the past several years and has had declining
print circulation as well.
2
At a time when the common wisdom says that newspapers are a dying medium from the last
century, why would one of the wealthiest men in the world purchase a paper that has had declining
revenue for six years? Bezos told the Post’s Farhi that he does not see any magic answer to the
problems metropolitan newspapers are facing:
The Post is famous for its investigative journalism. . .. It pours energy and investment and
sweat and dollars into uncovering important stories. And then a bunch of websites
summarize that [work] in about four minutes and readers can access that news for free.
One question is, how do you make a living in that kind of environment? If you can’t, it’s
difficult to put the right resources behind it.
3
1
Robert Z. Pearlman, “Jeff Bezos’ Salvaged Apollo Rocket Engines Reach Shore After Ocean Recovery,”
Space.com, March 22, 2013, www.space.com/20358-bezos-apollo-rocket-engines-shore.html.
2
Paul Farhi, “Washington Post to Be Sold to Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon,” Washington Post, August 5,
2013, www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-post-to–be-sold-to-jeff-bezos/2013/08/05/ca537c9e-fe0c-
11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html.
3
Paul Farhi, “Jeffery Bezos, Washington Post’s Next Owner, Aims for a New ‘Golden Era’ at the Newspaper,”
Washington Post, September 3, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jeffrey–bezos-washington-posts-
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
When the Graham family decided to sell the Washington Post, they were looking for an investor
who could pay the $250 million asking price and not demand an immediate return on the investment.
And that’s when CEO Don Graham thought about his friend Bezos. Despite dealing with cutting-edge
technology, Bezos has a reputation for taking the long-range view of business.
4
Back in 2011 in an
interview with longtime tech journalist Steven Levy, Bezos talked about the fact that his companies have
always taken a long view. Bezos says:
Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If
everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing
against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven–year time horizon, you’re
now competing against a fraction of those people because very few people are willing to
do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could
never otherwise pursue.
5
One of Bezos’s first innovations after buying the paper was providing subscribers to other
metropolitan papers, including the Dallas Morning News, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, unlimited free access to the Post’s website and mobile apps. Normally, people
who want to view more than a limited number of articles at the Post have to pay a monthly subscription
fee (your author among them). The goal of Bezos’s plan is to bring people in to the site who are outside
of the paper’s print circulation area and who are unlikely to be good candidates for becoming paying
customers, but who still have a documented interest in news. Bezos might also look at bundling access
to the Post with other online subscription services, such as Amazon Prime or Spotify.
6
In another action,
the Post actually has been hiring people, adding 50 new staffers during the first half of 2014. This is in
sharp contrast to the years of buyouts of senior employees that had cut the size of the newsroom over
previous years.
7
Although Bezos has said he hasn’t figured out how to make a major metropolitan paper into a
growing, profitable media outlet, he does know that the paper’s readers have to be at the company’s
next-owner-aims-for-a-new-golden-era-at-the-newspaper/2013/09/02/30c00b60-13f6-11e3-b182-
1b3bb2eb474c_story.html.
4
Craig Timberg and Jia Lynn Yang, “The Sale of The Washington Post: How the Unthinkable Choice Became the
Clear Path,” Washington Post, August 6, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/the-sale-
of-the-washington-post-how-the-unthinkable-choice-became-the-clear-path/2013/08/06/46216532-fed7-11e2-
9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html.
5
Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think,” Wired, November 13, 2011,
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/ff_bezos/all/1.
6
Victor Luckerson, “Jeff Bezos Makes His First Major Move at the Washington Post,” Time, March 19, 2014,
time.com/30243/jeff-bezos-makes-his-first-major-move-at-the-washington-post/.
7
Michael Calderone, “Washington Post Has Hired 50 Staffers in 2014 Amid Bezos-Funded Expansion,” Huffington
Post, May 12, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/12/washington-post-bezos-50-staffers_n_5310221.html.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
core. “I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece. Whatever the mission is, it has
news at its heart.”
8
HOW PHOTOGRAPHERS AT THE FLINT JOURNAL COVERED THE FLINT WATER CRISIS
Local media, such as the Flint Journal newspaper, played a key role in getting out the story of the
Flint water crisis caused by lead leaching out of pipes in the Michigan city. Here’s the story of how
photographers at the Journal, who had been drinking the water, covered the story. Much like the
journalists in New Orleans who covered Hurricane Katrina, reporters and photographers in Flint took the
story personally.
http://time.com/4187382/water-crisis-flint-michigan-photography/
How Student Media Stayed Online When News Broke Around Them:
When the story broke on Thursday, December 8, 2011, about a shooting that left two dead on
the Virginia Tech campus, two things happened: People started remembering the horror of the 2007
shooting on the same campus that left 33 dead, and folks nationwide started turning to the website for
the Collegiate Times, the school’s student newspaper, for up–to-the-minute news about what was
happening on campus.
However, due to the sudden surge of readership, both the Collegiate Times and the Virginia
Tech websites were unable to handle the load and went down. But the quick thinking students at
Collegiate Times rapidly got a minimalist photo blog up and running. They later redirected their
website’s URL to the paper’s Twitter feed. This was similar to what major news organizations had to do
on September 11, 2001 in order to keep their websites running as everyone in the country was trying to
come to terms with the United States under attack. Not long after Collegiate Times got its site up and
running, the official Virginia Tech page also came back up in minimalist form.
While the Collegiate Times reporters and editors have justifiably been praised for their work
covering the shooting, one of the real journalistic heroes of the day was online director Jamie Chung.
Poynter.org reports that Chung used the computer in his dorm room to keep photos and news flowing
to the paper’s website while it was up. When the site crashed under the sudden influx of traffic, Chung
did a redirect first to a breaking news section, then to a WordPress site, and finally to the paper’s
Twitter feed.
Chung told Poynter:
It was very important to us to make sure we could still reach our audience. . ..
The biggest challenge was knowing there was a problem that you know needs to be
fixed but feeling like it’s completely out of your control. We said, “We might be down,
8
Farhi, “Jeffery Bezos, Washington Post’s Next Owner, Aims for a New ‘Golden Era’ at the Newspaper.”
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
but we still need some credible channel for our audience to access the news.”
9
As the student newspaper website wasonly minimally functional, the reporters working at the
paper began using Twitter to push reliable news out to readers. The paper’s Twitter account,
@collegiatetimes, had fewer than 2,000 followers that morning, but it had more than 20,800 followers
by 3:18 p.m. Central Time that afternoon.
10
The university itself also made extensive use of its Twitter
account in the absence of a usable website.
By 4 p.m., police in Blacksburg, Virginia, were reporting that there was no longer an “active
threat” on the campus, and it was becoming clear that this shooting, as tragic as it was, would not be as
extensive as the massacre of 2007.
11
The lesson from Virginia Tech is pretty clear: Communications professionals in both the news
and public relations arenas must have an alternative plan in place for dealing with an overloaded Web
server, and they should have a social media communication strategy in place to communicate under
normal circumstances, and in times of emergency.
There can be no doubt that student journalists at Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times offered the
best coverage in the country of the 2011 shooting deaths, and they received praise from both the New
York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
12
Although local television station WDBJ served the national
audience by live streaming its coverage, no one came close to the student newspaper’s excellent job of
covering the story as it broke using Twitter and other social media. The Collegiate Times also produced a
skillful special edition of the paper that was available both in print and online.
All this is not to say that the coverage by the Collegiate Times was perfect. Any time you try to
cover a breaking story in real time, you are going to make mistakes—sometimes big ones. At one point,
the paper’s staff posted a photo that was actually from the 2007 mass shooting on campus. But to their
credit, the staff not only took the photo down as soon as they realized their mistake, they also publicly
acknowledged the error and ran a correction through Twitter.
13
Aside from providing good local coverage, the students also showed a savvy understanding of
what could be done with social media. As the Media Decoder blog at the New York Times pointed out,
the paper made good use of crowdsourcing news about the shootings, publishing reports it received
9
Mallary Jean Tenore, “Collegiate Times Publishes Special Edition After Virginia Tech Campus Shooting,”
December 9, 2011, http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/155483/collegiate-times-online-director-it–was–
very-important-to-make-sure-we-could-still-reach–our-audience/.
10
Deborah Netburn and Rene Lynch, “Virginia Tech Shootings: Student Paper Covers It from the Inside,” Los
Angeles Times, December 8, 2011, latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/12/virginia-tech-shooting.html.
11
Virginia Tech News Twitter Account @vtnews, December 8, 2011,
twitter.com/#!/vtnews/status/144891337798463488.
12
Netburn and Lynch, “Virginia Tech Shootings: Student Paper Covers It from the Inside”; Jennifer Preston and
Brian Stelter, “Using Twitter, Virginia Tech’s College Newspaper Kept on Publishing,” New York Times,
December 8, 2011, mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/using-twitter-virginia-techs-college-
newspaper-kept-on-publishing/.
13
Netburn and Lynch, “Virginia Tech Shootings: Student Paper Covers It from the Inside.”
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
from students and others around campus. The reporters also did a commendable job of making clear
what they knew for sure and what was news they were uncertain about.
14
Professional newspapers could learn a lot from how student journalists have handled fast-
breaking news using social media in tandem with their websites and print editions. Student journalists at
Penn State’s Daily Collegian provided comprehensive coverage of how the campus responded on the
night legendary football coach Joe Paterno was fired for his handling of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse
scandal; and West Virginia University’s Daily Athenaeum had video stories up on YouTube covering
student reaction to President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed.
DEATH OF WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER DANNY PEARL
Covering the news, especially from a war zone, can be a dangerous occupation.
“The deaths in Iraq reflect the utter deterioration in reporters’ traditional status as neutral
observers in wartime,” said Committee to Protect Journalists executive director Joel Simon. “When this
conflict began…, most journalists died in combat-related incidents. Now, insurgents routinely target
journalists.”
15
This continues a trend that started with the murder of popular Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl back in 2002. A videotape discovered on February 25, 2002, showed Pearl being
stabbed to death and then decapitated. Pearl had been kidnapped in Pakistan on January 23 while
attempting to reach a radical Islamic cleric for an interview.
16
The story he was chasing, however, was
apparently a trap designed by a group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of
Pakistani Sovereignty.
17
Four men were eventually captured and convicted in Pakistani courts for his
kidnapping and murder. Pearl and his wife, Mariane, a freelance broadcast journalist, had arrived in
Pakistan shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He was covering the country as part of his job as
the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief.
Mariane Pearl says that her husband’s kidnapping was not a typical one, where the goal is
ransom or exchange. “My feeling is that the killing of Danny was more of a declaration of war.”
18
Why
Pearl was murdered is not clear. His widow speculates that it could have been for a story he had written
or something he was working on. He may have simply been seen as a symbol of the West.
In 2013, at least 70journalists were killed around the world in a direct connection to their work,
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of those deaths, 28 came from reporters covering
the civil war in Syria. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that deteriorating security conditions
have “made it virtually impossible for foreign journalists to work in Syria.” Among the dozens of
journalists who have been kidnapped, there was NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and
his crew. The journalists were captured by a Syrian militia group while traveling with a group of Syrian
rebels. Although Engel and his team were not physically harmed, they were subject to repeated mock
executions. The news team was finally freed when the militia members holding them got into a firefight
14
Preston and Stelter, “Using Twitter, Virginia Tech’s College Newspaper Kept on Publishing.”
15
Committee to Protect Journalists, “In Iraq, Journalist Deaths Spike to Record in 2006,” December 20, 2006,
cpj.org/reports/2006/12/killed-06.php.
16
Patricia Ward Biederman, “Services to Mark Death of Reporter,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2003.
17
Nancy Gibbs, “Death in the Shadow War,” Time, March 4, 2002.
18
Jim Lehrer, “Mariane Pearl,” in NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS, 2002).
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
at a rebel checkpoint. Iraq was the number two country for journalism fatalities in 2013 with ten, Egypt
with six, Pakistan with five, and Somalia with four.
19
Terry Anderson, an Associated Press reporter who was kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985 and held
hostage for seven years, asks, “Why would anyone undertake this kind of work?” He finds the answer
within Pearl’s life. At the time of his kidnapping, Pearl was determined to try to understand why a man
would pack his shoes with explosives before boarding an airplane. Anderson says that correspondents
like Pearl put themselves at risk because they believe in reporting the truth.
They believe it is better for you to know that such things happen than not to know. They believe
it is better for you to see the faces of the victims, almost always innocent children and women, and to
hear their voices than to let them die ignored and unrecognized. They believe that if they can just make
you pay attention, your horror and anger and outrage will match theirs, and you will demand that such
things stop. And sometimes, they are right.
20
JANET COOKE AND THE WASHINGTON POST
Watergate was no doubt a high point for the Washington Post, but the Janet Cooke story was
likely one of its lowest. Cooke was hired by the Post to improve its coverage of the African-American
community. She was a young African-American woman who claimed to have a degree from Vassar, and
she was a fantastic writer. On Sunday, September 28, 1980, Cooke delivered just the kind of story she
had been hired to write—a compelling account of an 8-year-old boy named Jimmy who was a heroin
addict being shot up by his mother’s boyfriend. Although the story was compelling, it wasn’t true—
something that was not discovered until the story was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Days after
Cooke won the award, reporters learned that her college credentials had been fabricated, and soon she
confessed that Jimmy’s story had been made up as well.
21
Cooke obviously had not behaved ethically in fabricating the story and her credentials. But Bob
Woodward, who was one of Cooke’s editors, also accepted responsibility for printing the story.
Woodward explained the journalistic and moral lapse in an interview with Washingtonian magazine:
When we found [the story] was a fraud, we exposed it ourselves, putting all
the information, very painfully, in the paper. We acknowledged a lapse of journalism.
It took me a while to understand the moral lapse, which was the more
unforgivable one. I should have tried to save the kid and then do the story…. If it
19
Maya Taal, “CPJ Risk List: Where Press Freedom Suffered,” Committee to Protect Journalists, 2014,
cpj.org/2014/02/attacks-on-the-press-cpj-risk-list-1.php; “70 Journalists Killed in 2013/Motive Confirmed,”
Committee to Protect Journalists, 2014, cpj.org/killed/2013/; Mike Brunker, “Richard Engel and NBC News
Team Freed from Captors in Syria,” NBC News, December 18, 2014,
worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/18/15985279-richard-engel-and-nbc-news-team-freed-from-captors-in–
syria?lite.
20
Terry Anderson, “He Took a Risk in Pursuit of the Truth,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2002.
21
Ibid.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
happened now, I’d say, “Okay, where’s this kid who’s being tortured to death?”
My journalistic failure was immense, but the moral failure was worse. And if I
had worried about the kid, I would have learned that the story was a fraud. There
would have been no journalistic failure.
22
Fourteen years after Cooke’s story was written, retired Post editor Ben Bradlee was still haunted
by the story and by the blow it delivered to the paper’s credibility: “That was a terrible blot on our
reputation. I’d give anything to wipe that one off.”
23
NOTES: CRIME NEWS AND ETHICS―EDNA BUCHANAN: Covering crime also brings about some of the
toughest ethical calls in the newspaper business. What does a reporter do when she knows she has a
story, and the police say she shouldn’t print it? Pulitzer Prize winning former Miami Herald reporter
Edna Buchanan believes the answer is easy: Run the story. She writes that accurate, detailed reporting
can help solve “unsolvable” crimes. Buchanan uses as an example a serial rapist who had been attacking
women in Miami for more than two years. During this entire time, the police kept the investigation
quiet. Through the course of her reporting Buchanan learned a lot about the so-called “Bird Road
Rapist,” who would flash his headlights at women driving by themselves at night on Bird Road. The
women would stop their cars and then be assaulted by the man.
Buchanan, in her 1987 book The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, had this to say about the case:
“I heard about the rapist and began gathering information for a story. The cops were furious. Their
lieutenant even called my editor, insisting we keep it out of the paper. Their reasoning was the usual: If
the rapist is tipped off that police are looking for him; they will never be able to catch him.”
So what’s a reporter to do? Whom should she serve? Should she help the police or report the story?
Buchanan, as she usually did, came down on the side of printing the story because that’s the journalist’s
job. The Miami Herald ran Buchanan’s story about the rapist on a Sunday, and by the end of the week
the rapist was in jail.
“Half a dozen new victims called police after reading the story,” Buchanan writes. Embarrassed,
ashamed, or afraid, they had never reported their encounters with the rapist. Each thought she was the
only victim, until she read the newspaper. Among them were women with more accurate descriptions of
the man and the cars he drove. One had even seen him in a gas station sometime after the rape. Based
on the new information, detectives were able to identify and arrest him.
“He was sentenced to multiple life terms.”
This is an old example, but I’ve never seen the situation explained better.
22
Ken Adelman, “You Can’t Have Secrets,” Washingtonian, August 1994.
23
Alicia C. Shepard, “Ben Bradlee,” American Journalism Review, March 1995.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Hurricane Katrina
Reporters generally work under the ideal that they are supposed to be detached, objective
observers of the news, no matter what happens. But when Hurricane Katrina unleashed the flooding of
New Orleans in August 2005, the staff of the Times-Picayune could not and would not hold back their
feelings.
On Monday, August 29, after the storm hit, James O’Byrne, features editor for the Times-
Picayune, was covering Katrina with Doug MacCash, the paper’s art critic. Unlike the national reporters
located in the higher areas of the city who were saying that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet,” the two
were on their bicycles on a railroad bridge looking over Lake Pontchartrain. They could see what the
others could not—that a huge flood of water was heading into the city not from the sea, but from the
lake.
O’Byrne said everyone at the paper knew things would be bad when the meteorologist they
used as a source asked, “How far above sea level is the third floor of your building?”
24
On Tuesday morning, the 80 or so staff members who had stayed behind were forced to
evacuate, riding in the back of newspaper delivery trucks. The paper initially planned to publish a blog
when possible, but the staff couldn’t stand the thought of not covering such a big story in their own
hometown. Sports editor David Meeks made the suggestion to management: “Give me a delivery truck
and a small group of writers. We’ll go back.”
25
The staff never stopped publishing online, and by Thursday they were printing a paper edition
again. The challenges facing them were enormous. There were questions of how to eat, where to stay,
how to submit stories. The paper set up new headquarters in Baton Rouge, about an hour away. The
head of IT had to charge $22,000 worth of software and computers on his corporate card with the hope
that he would somehow get reimbursed.
26
Photographer Ted Jackson didn’t quite follow instructions when the order to evacuate came.
While on his way to the circulation trucks, the photographer saw an abandoned flatboat at the Times-
Picayune’s back steps with a broken broom to use as a paddle. So, Jackson said, with “two cameras, my
cell phone, my laptop and a small backpack of food and water, I shoved off and paddled away over
coworkers’ flooded cars.”
27
Jackson quickly saw that he was going to be personally involved with the story whether he
wanted to be or not. “I suddenly realized the moral and ethical dilemma I was facing. Everyone stranded
by the flood would want my small boat and would do anything to take it. . .. Would I let people drown
when I had the only boat in sight?” He decided he would rescue people in the water, but not those who
were on land or in a house.
The first person he rescued was a fellow Times-Picayune photographer who held a plastic bag
full of photo data cards in his teeth.
After hours of rowing around and taking pictures, Jackson collapsed for a while and then started
24
James O’Byrne, “Katrina: The Power of the Press Against the Wrath of Nature,” Poynter Institute, September 1,
2006, www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=106352.
25
Brian Thevenot, “Apocalypse in New Orleans,” American Journalism Review, October/November 2005, 24–31.
26
O’Byrne, “Katrina: The Power of the Press Against the Wrath of Nature.”
27
Ted Jackson, “Ted Jackson: Our Lives, Ours to Cover,” Poynter Institute, September 1, 2006,
www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=106673.
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Lecture Builders
hitchhiking rides in Blackhawk helicopters to get out and take more pictures. There was no way Jackson
could stay detached following his odyssey. He writes, “I’ve covered tragedies all over the world, but it’s
different when it’s your own town. Cataclysmic annihilation is starting to feel normal. This story is ours
to cover, but it’s more than that. This is now our life.”
28
O’Byrne says, as all the reporters at the paper do, that this was their story, a part of their lives.
(Even for reporters, or perhaps especially for them, Truth One is vital—The media are essential
components of our lives.) “We are narrator and subject of the story of New Orleans, a quandary that,
pre-Katrina, we were usually able to avoid.” He notes that more than one–third of his department’s staff
lost their homes from Katrina. “They, like dozens of Times-Picayune employees, understand the stress,
the despair, the frustration and the struggle that is life in New Orleans still today.”
29
The fact that they could not remain detached did not excuse the reporters from their
responsibility to be accurate observers, something that was difficult in all the confusion of the storm and
flood. Reporter Brian Thevenot said that some stories were reported as fact with only partial support.
The story of a single mentally ill man shooting at a single rescue helicopter got turned into snipers at the
Superdome shooting at the rescue helicopters. And widespread stories about the rape of children, again
at the Superdome, were undocumented, though some rapes certainly could have occurred.
30
Thevenot
and the staff of the Times-Picayune took the accuracy responsibility seriously enough to run their
corrections as a major front-page story about a month after the storm.
31
The key issue to Thevenot is that the Times-Picayune (and other news organizations) went back
after the storm and made a real effort to find out how much of the atrocity stories was true and what
was myth. As Keith Woods, of the journalistic think tank the Poynter Institute, told Thevenot, “Don’t
forget, the journalists kept reporting—the reason you know that things were reported badly is because
the journalists told you.”
32
In 2006, the Times-Picayune shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service, along with the
Biloxi-Gulfport, Mississippi, Sun-Herald, and received a second prize for breaking news reporting. What
explains the Pulitzers and the great reporting? Features editor James O’Byrne says it was the paper’s
