If we don't have newspapers, we won't need the Pulitzers
A journalist for whom I have a great deal of respect wrote a piece on an industry web site bemoaning the fact that in the last few years, a disproportionate number of Pulitzer Prizes have gone to the nation's biggest newspapers.

I have to confess I'm a lot less worried about small newspapers' Pulitzer chances than I am about their chances for survival.

After 17 years in the business – at papers ranging in size from the 60,000-circulation paper in my Missouri hometown to the nation's eighth-largest newspaper – I have reached a conclusion about the future of print journalism, and it is this:

The print newspaper will someday die. Its death will be a suicide.

The corporations are going to kill the newspaper by continuing to allow smaller newspapers to be bad.

I don’t know off the top of my head the percentage of the population that lives outside the top 50 markets, but I’m sure it’s a significant number of potential readers. Yet, in many cases, we give these readers two choices:

An under-staffed, under-newsholed, under-funded Gannett or Knight-Ridder profit center, or

a first edition of a possibly faraway metro, which might well have gone to bed as early as 9:30 or 10 p.m and as such lacks key information, such as sports scores.

Meanwhile, the corporations funnel a disproportionate amount of resources, talent and funding to their large papers.

I'm not saying that the paper in Grand Forks, N.D., or Rome, Ga., should be a Pulitzer contender every year. But so many sub-100,000 circulation papers are barely serving their readers, never mind fighting for awards. This is something that should be a matter of great concern among those who have a vested interest in the continued health of the newspaper industry.

Many people choose to live in small towns and cities. These people deserve a good newspaper.

Many other people grow up in small towns and cities and move away. They never pick up the newspaper habit because the local rag isn’t worth reading. As an industry, we need to figure out how to get an interesting product to those people so that when they do move away, they won’t equally ignore The New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is not necessarily an anti-corporate journalism rant. Plenty of family-owned small newspapers are gawdafwul. Every newspaper I've worked for has been owned by a large corporation. I'm lucky to work for a corporate-owned newspaper that has the resources to have a serious commitment to quality journalism, despite not being the corporate flagship.

But I've seen -- and have tried to read -- too many examples of the opposite. And I think as an industry, we’re only a few years away from really regretting that we let that happen.