"I'm devastated and sad my [Pulitzer] dream has been stolen."

The higher ups at ESPN would say the same thing. Making money on the magazine is secondary to promoting the brand.

I like the magazine and have been a subscriber since the beginning. As it's always been very good journalistic stories get lost in the clutter of promotion.

 

That's fair. But you still have to draw the line somewhere, right? I mean, Hillary Clinton's Web site may produce the greatest Hillary Clinton feature ever written. But no one is going to argue that it should be eligible for a journalism award, even if Clinton swears she gave the commissioned writer full editorial independence.

The relationship between ESPN and the NFL (and other leagues) isn't quite that. But it's still too compromised, and it's easily on that side of the line, for me to believe that it should be arguably eligible for a Pulitzer Prize. Even given that, like you point out, the Pulitzers may be compromised in some ways already. That doesn't mean anything goes now. I frequently accepted free soda at games I covered. Didn't think twice about it (maybe I should have). I wouldn't take a free set of golf clubs, though.

 

BIGSPORTSWRITER tweeted earlier about Whitlock being a joke in the sports commentary circle because of this.

Here's Keith Law's first line from his ESPN.com chat today:

"Sorry I'm late, I was working on my Pulitzer submission packet..."

 

I don't care if Whitlock has a point about Pulitzer eligibility, his piece was ridiculous, though it was typical of Whitlock. A good point buried in so much self-aggrandizing crap laden with a dozen pointless detours that make it barely readable.

Even if he was eligible, its hard to win a Pulitzer when you can't get through one Whitlock column without being buried in a pointless morass. The man has a 1,000 ideas in his head and about 100 conspiracy theories, many of both being good, but the days when he synthesizes them into a coherent point are few and far between. The days when he leaves himself out of the narrative are even further and farther between.

And as an alum of the same university he attended, I read it with slack-jawed, gobsmacked shame that the school's paper was used as Whitlock's forum to have an awards temper tantrum.

 

ESPN publishes stories on events they don't broadcast. Lots of them.

However, ESPN the Magazine is also the only place I ever seen anything on the X Games. Wonder why?

 

Online "news sites" are eligible for Pulitzers. The Huffington Post won one last year. Better question here is, should a "sports" site be considered a "news" site? IMO, yes. Is it? I don't know.

As for the politics of the APSE contests, they're junior-high elections next to the king-making politics of the Pulitzer.

 

The scary thing is in five years, this will turn into Whitlock stating as fact that he would have won the Pulitzer if not for the eligibility rules. And some people somewhere will go along with that.

Will be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of the actual columnist winner this year.

 

Sports journalists win Pulitzers for one of two ways. Either big-time investigative stuff (which we all know fans don't much care for, but juries do) or lifetime awards for commentary for being so good even those stuffed shirts have to see it, such as Jim Murray.
Online sportswriters will of course eventually win in both those ways -- the first within my lifetime, the second not.
Jason is a very good columnist. I like to think I was, too. But I never thought I should get a Pulitzer, and I sure as hell don't think as a reader he should either.

 

I generally find Whitlock at least intermittently interesting, in particular when he writes on football, but while psychoanalying from a distance is always dangerous, it seems pretty obvious he's got some real issues. If you look at the list of columns he submitted in support of his application, one of them is an evisceration of Posnanski after the Paterno book came out; that he thought a column in which his worthwhile points were obscured by his repeated, caustic attacks on a well-regarded former coworker was one of his best efforts really makes you wonder. The Posnanski/Whitlock dynamic seems quite odd - simply professional jealousy? Is Whitlock somehow upset on racial grounds with how Posnanski hitched his wagon to Buck O'Neill's star?

 

I have no words.

Entitled me?

 

Outside sports, the Pulitzer often goes to the newspaper closest to where the big storm hit.

 

I believe it was one of the few columns where he did actual reporting this year. It sounds like I'm making a joke, but I'm not. In his eagerness to embarrass Pos, he was suddenly motivated to pick up a phone and make some calls, trying to track down Penn State's first African American quarterback. (While he was in Vegas, I believe he pointed out.) And he made a decent point there, asking why Pos hadn't done the same. I just wish he would apply that vigor to other columns, which he rarely does. It is easier to offer a "take" instead.