Monday, April 11, 2005
The Award
The Pulitzer committee can never hope to pick a piece that pleases everyone, or even the majority -- so it often opts for choosing the piece that offends the fewest.
To me, the problem is the scope of the award. The Pulitzer Prize in journalism is given in a bunch of different categories: international reporting, national reporting, explanatory reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, editorial cartooning, to name a few.
Rather than raising money to record the One Great Work of the year, I would support raising money to create the kinds of categories that would accurately reflect the diversity of new music. Failing that, I would recommend that we stop wishing that the Pulitzer could mean more than any single award possibly can. The situation we have is as if you had only an Oscar for Best Movie Person, and all the directors and actors and screenwriters and technicians, etc. argued about which of them was most deserving.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
1:38 PM
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