Susan Fowler's Uber Expose Should Win a Pulitzer

Here's an example, from internet deep learning celebrity Siraj Raval: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Decentralized-Applications-Harnessi...

(not denying any of the credentials you quoted in your comment though, just responding to that particular point)

I see this as a media-train hop. If this same situation had happened in a multibillion-dollar financial company that didn't have as many subsequent PR issues, would we be praising her as high?

I'm not trying to take any thing away from her. I want Uber to crash and burn and be forgotten. I want her to receive as much as possible in terms of justice. What I DON'T want is for this to be spun into click-bait PR for the pulitzer, and tangentially - Uber. What about the millions of women who get harassed daily but work for less "important" companies? Shouldn't they be considered potential pulitzer winners for their blog posts and facebook statuses?

The only reason anybody cares is because Uber is A Big Name. This will not change her life for the better. Uber will continue doing as it has been doing. The issue will not be solved. But these articles will get clicked on.

She wrote about her experience, which was incredibly brave and hard to do. She put her future career on the line. And she was the right person at the right company at the right time (or wrong, depending on how you look at it).

She didn't investigate much at all. She didn't uncover much at all. She certainly hasn't reformed uber, but caused a spotlight on uber that has caused reform to happen.

Google just recently refused to release salary numbers across their workforce because it "would be too expensive" which is really another way of saying the truth would paint them in a very harsh light. Going further back the big three were colluding to keep engineer salaries low with non-poaching agreements.

The industry as a whole is unhealthy and it is important to continue calling out all the bullshit and not becoming complacent with the status quo. For every Susan Fowler there are a few thousand that suffer in silence or worse yet they speak up and are punished.

After all, as nerds, we should have an idea what it's like to be bullied.

A personal account -- however valuable -- is not that kind of investigative journalism; at most, it might feed into someone else's investigative work, where they go in and get access to documents, get other sources (including people) to corroborate the information, etc. That kind of thing is what the Pulitzer organization is trying to recognize.

To adapt your analogy:

>Counter point: If an indie game dev makes a non-aaa game that enthralls people, would that not be a contender for a game-of-the-whatever award?

If the award were for groundbreaking new games, then no, they shouldn't discriminate against someone merely for being a low budget indie. But if it were merely a mod to some existing game that keeps the core functionality, then the award would be inappropriate. Another category could still be merited, though.

I wish you had other options. :(

EDIT: As Anders points out in the article.

So, if the goals of the Pulitzer prize were to reward good journalism, I do not think this would be a good choice.

However, if the goals of the Pulitzer is to reward good writing that has an impact, regardless of whether it is journalism™ or not, then this seems like a good fit.

I feel like the Pulitzer prize leans towards the former though, if you look at the National Reporting Pulitzer this year, it went to WaPo for some Trump reporting, which AFAICT has had no impact whatsoever.

None of those are really suitable nor would her blog piece be competitive in a category that would only be potentially suitable. And in my opinion it certainly doesn't deserve a pulitzer in investigative journalism.

I think it would be cool to a new category for something like this that better captures the intent of the piece.

There is a difference between writing about events in which you are a principal actor and ones where you are not, though needless to say that line is often very blurry.

I believe the whole point is that there was no data collection or investigation of any sort, just a bunch of (still) unconfirmed personal anecdotes.

Now, if she had somehow managed to legally obtain records of leaked emails and documents from different, corroborated sources, and managed to stitch together and paint a coherent narrative, then it wouldn't matter what training she received, she would be an investigative journalist and would and should be considered for the pulitzer, even though she wasn't writing for any traditional media source.

As it stands, she's put together a compelling piece of writing about personal experience that tends to be supported by other evidence that's only now coming forward, not collected by her and released by her.

Any sort of investigative journalism should pay attention to both investigation and jornalism (of any sort and format), or else it should not be considered for that category, or else there should be another category created for "personal experience shared".

Grade A snark like that is how we know this is a Pulitzer-winning journalist.