The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded yesterday and the journalism crowd was happily reminded of its own significance.
"The Pulitzer," says the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow's (Pulitzer Prize-winning) novel, Humboldt's Gift, in a more piquant reminder of our profession's historic stature, "is for the birds. For the pullets. It's just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates."
Journalism used to be a humble, relatively crap profession in awe of novelists and real men of letters. Journalists -- once known as reporters -- were second-tier types, who dreamt, nearly always futilely, of graduating to the higher plane.
Then novelists and men of letters got put out of business or retreated to universities, and non-fiction became the coin of the literary realm. What's more, Watergate came along and suddenly the news business was filled with Ivy Leaguers and an elevated sense of its own mission.
Thereupon began a quarter-century of self-importance and earnestness, which has not ended, even in the face of the profession becoming among the most unpopular in the nation and with many (if not most) of its outlets facing obsolesce and bankruptcy.
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Charles Warner: 2010 Pulitzer Prizes: Good News
The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were good news that not only reinforced the notion of what good journalism is, but they also, by what they left out, reminded us of what bad journalism is.
On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded Versed by Rae Armantrout their 2010 award for poetry.
"the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050."