Who’s trying to win a Pulitzer for their payday loan reporting?
July 25, 2008 | Chicago Tribune, media coverage | Comments (0)The Pundit has been thinking about this question quite a bit recently as the media attention and “special series” features have been ratcheted up. It’s all reminiscent of the final season of HBO’s The Wire, which partially focuses on the fictional newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. In explaining the “new thinking” of newsrooms around the country, which boils down to a formula that is closely followed in order to win Pulitzer Prizes, Wire creator David Simon had this to say:
“[Newspapers] [s]urround a simple outrage, overreport it, claim credit for breaking it, make sure [they] find a villain, then claim [they] affected change as a result of [their] coverage. Do it in a five-part series, and make sure [they] get ‘the [our paper] has learned’ in the second graph.”
Are any of the papers doing this? For a hint, let’s look at a recent interview of the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Franklin. The Tribune has been running a series called “Cashed Out” (about payday loans and other “trap doors” in the economy). Franklin’s responses that seem to follow “the formula” are bolded:
“There is a lot of finger-pointing today about what’s gone wrong with the economy, and this is one small attempt to show specifically why this cycle is different than before.”
“In the early reporting, the lack of state laws or regulation dealing with high interest lenders helped make the stories more pertinent.”
“And this seems to be a problem as the financial crisis grows and new industries are created that claim to offer solutions for troubled consumers.”
“We do have more time and we intend to keep trying to look for new angles, new data, new ways of making the points compelling and important.”
“This week U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin [D-Ill.] introduced a bill capping “excessive” interest rates for payday loans and car title loans, and in doing so pointed to one our stories which talks about this.“
Payday Pundit hopes that Pulitzer Prize is worth limiting the financial options of thousands of the Tribune’s readers.
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