content analysis

I was catching up on back episodes of the great radio show On The Media (OTM to insiders) this weekend.  In this special episode on investigative reporting, long time 60 Minutes producer, Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino’s character in The Insider) made the intuitatively reasonable sounding claim that as money for investigative journalism drys up, most Pulitzers are increasingly going to a small number of elite newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times).

But is this empirically true?  A quick perusal of recent Pulitzer winners suggests the following:
1. It’s not that elite newspapers win most of the prizes.  It’s just that the Washington Post wins all of them.
2. Beyond the Post, most of the winners are newspapers with a circulation above 250,000, perhaps unsurprisingly.
3. Though the majority of the awards are won by big papers, small newspapers do win things with some regularity.  And it’s not just the same few small papers over and over again.

I wonder if a longer term analysis would show consolidation of Pulitzer prizes by elite newspapers in recent times.  Contrary to Bergman’s claim, I actually suspect that while the names shift over time, Pulitzer has always been dominated by a small number of elite newspapers.  Perhaps the competition was just tighter in the past.  Has anybody done research on this?