May 14: Pulitzer Prize winners
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Top Story of the week
The Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honor in American journalism, were awarded last week. For the first time in the prize’s history, more online news outlets were honored than newspapers.
Lookout Santa Cruz, a four-year-old online publication in Santa Cruz, California, won a Pulitzer in the breaking news category for “its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage” of catastrophic flooding and mudslides, according to prize administrator Marjorie Miller. And a small Chicago-based nonprofit news site, the Invisible Institute, won two Pulitzers for its work on criminal justice and policing. One of its prizes, in local reporting, was shared with City Bureau, another nonprofit newsroom, for a two-year investigation of how Chicago police handle cases of missing Black women and girls.
In the public service category — considered the most prestigious — ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom, won for its impactful reporting on how a small group of billionaires wooed U.S. Supreme Court justices. The coverage led “the Court to adopt its first code of conduct,” according to the Pulitzer Prize website. The list of honorees included The New York Times, The New Yorker, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press.
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RumorGuard post of the week
NLP created RumorGuard to fact-check viral rumors and help you build news literacy skills. Sign up to push back against misinformation HERE.
? NO: Neither U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican, nor Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the moon is more useful than the sun.
?? YES: This quote is an iteration of a phrase that has been circulating since the 1800s and has repeatedly been used to mock nonscientific opinions and the people who espouse them.
NewsLit takeaway:?False claims can easily slip by undetected when they affirm a previously held opinion. If we believe that certain politicians are unintelligent, for example, we are more prone to believe rumors that paint those politicians in that light. When a false claim employs humor, it can catch us off guard and make these claims more appealing. In this case, the quote appeals to opinions about controversial figures on both sides of the political aisle. If a piece of misinformation elicits the feeling that it might as well be true, it’s a good idea to take a moment, reevaluate viewpoints and make sure they are based on facts — not jokes.
Kickers of the week
? Israel ordered Arab news network Al Jazeera to shut down its operations in the country for at least 45 days, citing security concerns. The U.S. State Department released a statement disagreeing with the decision.
? Google is introducing AI-generated answers in search results — displacing links to human-written websites and sometimes making up fake answers.
? A Southern California school district with a large working-class Latino population is offering journalism courses and training for elementary, middle and high school students — providing students with a pathway for becoming journalists.
One last thing...
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