If a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google or Uber. Fowler did something great and it was powerful despite not being her life's focus. There are journalists who are as good as Fowler is at technology.
I dont think a Pulitzer is the venue to recognize Susan's work, nor do I think she would win. I do think we should recognize her writing, and believe she has already had a meaningful impact
She is currently running a magazine at Stripe (as in, she is the EIC). She was hired for this job in January, before publishing her blog post. She is represented by InkWell, a well-respected, elite, non-technical literary agency. She published a book through O'Reilly, arguably the number one firm for tech-related publications, in November of 2016. And she is the founder of a monthly book club (seemingly, for fun).
To present an analogy about Susan Fowler with "if a journalist with no experience..." is to present an analogy that is factually incorrect regarding her experience.
If a person created an open-source project on nights and weekends that received industry-wide acclaim, regardless of day job, he/she would most certainly be getting job offers.
Writing a book does not make you a journalist. It makes you an author. Not that it's not impressive, but it's not proof of experience as a journalist.
They are different jobs. You can write a book without doing any investigative reporting, but it would be hard for a journalist to do so. Siraj Raval might be a published author, but he still has next to no experience being a journalist.
There are good points to keeping Pulitzers for full time investigative reporters. But I'm not comfortable reserving the word "journalist" for a professional caste. The U.S. Constitution recognizes that written speech is an inalienable right. I think language and culture should as well. That is, a journalist is someone who decides to write about topical things.
So I think writing a topical piece does make you a journalist, though perhaps not one qualified for prestigious awards.
This is really under-selling what Susan Fowler did. She exposed and reformed a massive, multibillion-dollar company with a single essay. How many journalists have done that?
She should be recognized for the work she did, but awarding the pulitzer to this is a reach.
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.
I don't know if you are aware of who Pulitzer was, or what the award is about, but 'a media-train hop' often describes what wins the pulitzer pretty well.
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.
It was very brave of her to do what she did but I can't help but feel like her courageous act is being squandered by the rest of us. Uber is certainly the most egregious example of blatant sexism and just general aggressive incompetence but certainly not the only one.
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.
If a programmer with no entrepreneurial experience founded a company we wouldn't let them keep ownership and money when there are people for whom finance is their life's work! Gates has no degree Torvalds did not get first class honours from an Ivy League institution! DMR is not an MIT grad! If we start giving Turing awards to lesser tech institutions like Harvard...
FFS, merit dude. Merit. That's the thing, the only thing. If a rank amateur who is 14 years old and looks funny does superlative work and you are recognising superlative work ...
Is this work good enough for a pulitzer? Other considerations are utter crap and should be made fun of in a cruel fashion. After all, as nerds, that's what we /do/ in life.
My intuition is similar to the GP's -- Fowler deserves an award for this essay (like a Profiles in Courage award), but its seems out of scope of the Pulitzer award (that the author is referring to), which mentions investigative journalism -- when you probe some issue in depth and put together a coherent picture of what happened.
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 think giving the SRE title to a journalist who learnt to code and built something interesting is not the right analogy. It would be more like giving them the Turing award.
If a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google or Uber
She didn't just build something "interesting", but something that was so compelling it launched a large investigtion that affected the executive management structure at a $50B company.
If this journalist turned programmer did the same, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were hired by Google.
If a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google or Uber.
The obvious counter to this argument is that Google, Uber, etc frequently acqui-hire companies founded by people with no professional experience. That's the very definition of hiring someone because they made something interesting.
I feel she fits easier into the whistleblower ex-post category than reportage -although I can imagine her essay fitting into the criticism or commentary categories.
An interesting idea. Fowler certainly deserves credit for her work. As the author correctly notes, it was not only a courageous thing to publish, but also an impressive piece of writing.
On an unrelated note, the experience of reading this article for me was absolutely destroyed by the Forbes ad-block-blocker and the ad-first design of their article view. There were a couple of autoplaying video ads and one particularly pernicious scroll-locking ad on the sidebar to the right. Forbes is one of the very worst offenders in web monetization, as they demand you turn off AdBlock and then serve you a garbage reading experience (usually of a poorly written article by an unpaid or low-paid "contributor"). Every time I visit their website, I feel a sudden urge to start espousing Ev William's gospel that Something Must Be Done about content monetization on the internet, before Futurama becomes reality:
I've stopped reading Forbes articles because of it. I have no problem with sites monetizing their valuable content (I subscribe to the WSJ and FT because I generally value their product), but the in-your-face "you may not proceed" approach employed by Forbes really irks me for some reason.
Must be incredibly frustrating for you. Forbes is a prestigious outlet, a place where you should be proud to publish your work... yet they go out of their way to make it a huge hassle to read it.
That's gracious, thanks. Still, each writing home has its own mix of +/-. The overall Forbes environment offers fast turnaround, editorial freedom and sizable readership. And it pays! Getting 80% of my top five priorities in one stop is about as good as it ever gets.
Still, writing with fewer ads has its appeal, too. I'll mix things up every now and then with some postings for Quora, Technology Review, WSJ, etc., which fill in other circles in life's Venn diagram.
uBlock Origin has anti-anti-adblocker code which results in a perfectly readable forbes.com (and many other sites on which other adblockers drop the ball)
I only associated Pulitzers with journalists, reporters, writers, and other professionals in that vein. It's a fascinating new era where anyone (not just professionals) could be eligible because of the Web and its ability to connect people.
Well, Lin-Manuel Miranda won a Pulitzer for Hamilton. There is more than just journalists who can be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
For the full list, see the Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize#Categories
So you take a previous Pulitzer prize winning piece and the one variable you change is the author isn't a official journalist™ and now it's not Pulitzer worthy?
I would like to be believe the Pulitzer Prize should recognize exceptional work and the fact that exceptional work can come from anywhere shouldn't really be a problem.
To me, good journalism tries to discover new facts and synthesize the existing information available, which doesn't exactly seem like what Susan Fowler did when she wrote about her personal experience.
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.
I think it will be decided by the committee whether she gets the Pulitzer or not. Certainly there's a lot of paper out there around uber that contributes to the impact. But her commentary also has larger implications and in some sense reflects for better or worse society at large. We see it in the Senate confirmations and in the Congressional inquiries where members of Congress and the Senate are accused of being hysterical or otherwise out of order. We have a president who bragged about sexual assault. So it doesn't matter if she's a journalist or not.. she brought a spotlight to bear on an issue we largely ignore which is about the treatment of women.
Susan Fowlers piece was powerful, and definitely deserving of some kind of award/commendation, but I'm not sure if a Pulitzer is the right kind of award. My understanding is the Pulitzer is for investigative journalism, which I wouldn't call her article purely because the intent was not to embed yourself into Uber for a year and research/experience all the messed up things that went on with the intent to publish an expose.
Also, and maybe I have the wrong impression from TV/Movies, but I was under the impression that the Pulitzer usually gets awarded to investigative journalists who expose corruption/scandals on a larger scale than this.
Great example of a Personal Essay struggling with Truth and Context in ways that resonate with others. It's quite easy to dismiss a Person / Former Employee Complaints with "Oh that's just your experience, it's not a real problem" but it's not Honest[1]. There's merit in sharing personal truths by way of anecdote. Change can follow.
[1] Hysterical delivery, too much emotion, swearing, or just bad writing can ruin a piece's impact before it gets to its message, but when done with great craft, it's a sight to behold.
Disclaimer: I am not a writer and don't know anything about the Pulitzer, or even the criteria/categories, so my comment is genuinely curious here:
I'm not trying to downplay the importance and impact of Fowler's work, however, it seems a bit weird to me to award a Pulitzer using any of its existing categories. (Whether or not a new category should be created for her or whether an existing category's criteria be changed to allow for her work is a separate matter entirely).
The reason being is that I feel (with my admittedly complete amateurish opinion here) is that journalism as a craft should deal with the nature of third-party and objective investigating and reporting. There is a huge objective nature to journalism. Oftentimes, the expose or journalistic work undertaken by the journalist is about a third-party occurrence or individual(s), not about the journalist themselves.
Journalism is a noble profession. Example: War journalists. Soldiers risk their lives for their country; journalists risk their lives for something even less than that: a story. The story is almost never about the hardships the journalist undertook to report on such a story, only how those hardships affected others. Not the journalist themselves. They are removed and external to the story. Out of the picture frame, so to speak. The journalist recognizes that they are simply an external observer, with the key difference between themselves and who they report on is that they have luckily been blessed with the platform, the podium, from which their voice can be heard. They have the means to speak to the masses, and they must speak, but not for themselves. For others. Those that are unheard. It's not "I was rained on for three days straight camping out in the mountainside" it's "THEY were rained on for three days camping out in the mountainside".
My point behind all this is that at the heart of it, while Fowler's work was certainly impactful and shed light on a lot of issues at Uber/tech, it was not really journalism. There was no research and no investigation done into the treatment of women at Uber, other than a brief mention of her chatting with other women at the company who experienced a similar situation with the same manager she had. Other than that, it was mostly what happened to her. Arguably, I would feel like this should disqualify her even for the Public Service Pulitzer (which is usually awarded to newspapers, not individuals anyways), as the philosophy of Fowler's blog did not seem be in line with what I would consider to be journalism: the service of lending a voice to the voiceless. She wasn't speaking for others so much as she was speaking for herself.
Does that matter? After all, can't you say that a lot of external good came out of her personal blog on her personal experiences? I think it matters. I think journalism should remain objective and external to the reporter. There's too much of a conflict of interest and incentive to embellish details otherwise, when speaking and reporting for yourself and your benefit.
Tangential to this point is the fact that this story "fell into her lap" by virtue of it happening to her. She didn't seek out this story, something that was hidden in view. She merely recounted her experience. I'd give more credence to her blog as journalism if she made a marked effort to make the story more than just about her, even though the harassment happened to her as well.
I'm not trying to discount her story for a Pulitzer by virtue of Fowler not being a journalist, I am arguing on a philosophical level, a recount of something that happened to you is not journalism.
Only 1 out of 21 categories are reserved for investigative journalism, and there are categories reserved for commentary, criticism, and editorial, all of which are potentially suitable for Fowler's article.
I'm sure how familiar you are with the categories, but really, criticism?
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.
The category that would be applicable here is autobiography or maybe personal essay. Those aren't listed.
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.
Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article that ran between the headline and the comments section, but just in case ... In paragraph 10 of the story, I observe:
"It would be hard for a single blog post, no matter how detailed, to compete in the Pulitzers' investigative reporting category, where winners tend to be multi-part series that involve resource-intensive data collection. But the Pulitzers' public-service category is more fluid."
More broadly, the grand old prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc.) are wrestling with ways to update their century-old formats to match the world we live in. Any effort to stretch old boundaries will be at least slightly controversial. Even so, it's a more interesting world if the Nobel Prize for literature stretches to include Bob Dylan than if it doesn't. In the same way, starting to think about how/where to recognize the very best of the blogosphere in the Pulitzers is a conversation worth having.
> to compete in the Pulitzers' investigative reporting category, where winners tend to be multi-part series that involve resource-intensive data collection.
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".
