By Christopher B. Daly
Score another victory for serious journalism that was born on the Web. The born-digital environmental website “InsideClimate News” won a Pulitzer Prize this week for national reporting based on its stories about an oil pipeline spill in the Kalamazoo River.
That follows earlier Pulitzers awarded to The Huffington Post and Politico (2012) and ProPublica (2011).
According to a story in the Washington Post, InsideClimate News was founded in 2008 and has just seven staffers. Founder David Sassoon is listed on the website as a graduate of Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School. With no office, InsideClimate News has virtually no overhead and zero “legacy costs.” Instead, they appear to depend for support in large part from foundations — including, ironically, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is based on the fortune that the family made by dominating the market for, of all things, oil.
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