The News-Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1982 flood. That's when a newspaper can really shine -- when disaster strikes, and people desperately need to know what's going on. Well, there was this tiny little diaster in New Orleans, and the New-Orlleans Times-Picayne has done heroic work in continuing to publish. It certainly deserves at least consideration for a Pulitzer. But the Pulitzer people have these rules, you know. Online material will be considered for a prize only if it's presented as part of a package with print material. The only problem is that the T-P didn't have any print material for the simple reason that its presses, like everything else in New Orleans, was under water. The newspaper's masterful job of helping knit the community together in catastrophic times. The times they are a changin', and even the Times. Newspaper journalism isn't just a dead-tree product, and the Pulitzer people need to get with it before the world leaves them completely behind.
