The Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious US journalism awards, announced Monday they were expanding to include online-only publications.The Pulitzer Prize Board that oversees the awards said the 2009 prizes, which will be announced in April, had been broadened to include "text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet."
In a statement, the Board said it had "decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories."
Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, said the move was a "logical extension of the historic mission of the Pulitzer Prizes."
"We continue to keep an eye on the changing media scene and try to make appropriate adjustments as we go along," he told AFP.
"There's an evolutionary aspect to the Pulitzer Prizes going back through history," Gissler said. "We added photography in 1943, for example, and we added explanatory journalism, and we started allowing online content as early as 1999."
The Board said that online or print entries should come from US newspapers or news organizations that publish at least weekly and are "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories."
"Consistent with its historic focus on daily and weekly newspapers, the Board will continue to exclude entries from printed magazines and broadcast media and their respective Web sites," the statement said.
Online content from newspaper websites has been permitted in all journalism categories since 2006 but online-only publications were only allowed to submit entries in two categories — breaking news and breaking-news photography.
Among the prize categories are local reporting of breaking news, commentary, feature writing, investigative reporting, explanatory reporting and reporting on national or international affairs.
The deadline for entries in the 2009 competition is February 1.
