New Pulitzer Rules Will Allow Online Entries

By: Newspapers vying for a Pulitzer Prize, the top honor in American print journalism, can now include material published online as part of their entries, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced Wednesday.

The new rules come as newspapers increasingly rely on their Web sites to disseminate, support, and enhance their work, even as print circulation declines. The new guidelines will apply to the 2006 awards, which cover work in 2005.

"It's a very significant change," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers. "This reflects the growing importance of online content, but, at the same time, print remains very important, and I think the Pulitzer competition now reflects a blend of print and online, which is what most newspapers are seeking to achieve these days."

The competition's Public Service category, considered the most prestigious, has since 1999 allowed an online presentation to be part of entries. That category will continue to accept various forms of online work, including streaming video, databases, and timelines.

But the 13 other journalism categories will allow online content for the first time.

The online portion of entries in those categories will be limited to written pieces, such as news stories or columns, and still images. And only in the categories of breaking news reporting and breaking news photography can an entry consist solely of work published online.

Gissler declined to speculate on whether the Pulitzers would ever include a category specifically for online journalism. But he said a Pulitzer committee has monitored the growth of news outlets' Internet use since the late 1990s, and that it would "continue to monitor the medium."

In a separate change, the upcoming Pulitzer competition guidelines for the feature writing category have been altered. The category now will give "prime consideration to quality of writing, originality, and concision." The previous feature writing guidelines gave "prime consideration to high literary quality and originality."

Asked if the board wants to see shorter feature stories, Gissler said: "We've tended to have longer submissions, and I think this is an attempt to make it clear that we're interested in a range of possibilities, in case anyone had the notion that the only case the Pulitzer Prizes were interested in were lengthy packages."

The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism cover a range of categories, from cartooning to international reporting. Gissler said entrance eligibility will continue to remain restricted to newspapers published "daily, Sunday, or at least once a week during the calendar year."

The 2006 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced April 17.