Pulitzer Does Not Fully Express Power of Collaborative Snowden Reporting

The Washington Post and the Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for public service today. There's no prize for the network of individuals and institutions that brought the surveillance story forward.

As the New York Times reported:

Though the citation did not name specific reporters, the work was led by Barton Gellman at the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and journalist who worked with both newspapers.

And people will debate that-- not naming the reporters. Just as they debate the handling of the Snowden documents by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to First Look Media.)

Here I share some thoughts about the Snowden story -- or story system -- that go beyond what the prizes can recognize.

The Pulitzers are national (they honor U.S. journalism), institutional (the award frequently goes to a newspaper or newsroom) and individual (writers with bylines are typically named.)

The Snowden story is an international enterprise, involving the press, and press law, in the UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Canada and the United States for starters. It involves collaboration and alliance among freelance journalists with their own standing (Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras especially but also to a degree Barton Gellman) who are contracting with institutions and their unique strengths: the Guardian, the Washington Post won the Pulitzer but there are many others: the New York Times and ProPublica (with whom The Guardian shared some of the Snowden documents) Der Spiegel in Germany, O Globo in Brazil, CBC in Canada-- and more. There's no Pulitzer for that.

"Closest to those whose privacy has been invaded."

Greenwald has said this about the strategy that he and Poitras followed in reporting out the Snowden files:

I reported on most of them under a freelance contract with the Guardian, and she has reported on most under similar contracts with the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian and especially der Spiegel. But we also have partnered with multiple media outlets around the world - in Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Spain, Holland, Mexico, and Norway, with more shortly to come - to ensure that the documents are reported on in those places where the interest level is highest and are closest to those individuals whose privacy has been invaded.

In my view that decision -- through collaboration, release stories in the press vehicle "closest to those individuals whose privacy has been invaded" -- won the Pulitzer today.

"We did not have to do our reporting from London."

At crucial moments, the "networked" character of the story kept it from being bottled up by the authorities. The most dramatic is when Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian told the authorities in London that he would comply with their demands to destroy the computer hard drives containing the Snowden files. But:

I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

In a sense it's that moment that deserved the Pulitzer today.

The international press sphere

When the Guardian shared some of the Snowden documents with ProPublica and the New York Times, there was a logic to spreading the wealth and joining forces in this way. They had worked it out over Wikileaks. Rusbridger:

[It] happened just after we took possession of the first tranche of WikiLeaks documents in 2010. I strongly suspected that our ability to research and publish anything to do with this trove of secret material would be severely constrained in the UK. America, for all its own problems with media laws and whistleblowers, at least has press freedom enshrined in a written constitution. It is also, I hope, unthinkable that any US government would attempt prior restraint against a news organisation planning to publish material that informed an important public debate, however troublesome or embarrassing.

In a sense it has been the international press sphere, an alliance of newsrooms on several continents, that's been publishing the Snowden files. That way of doing it won a Pulitzer today.

Waiting for one 'coherent' story...

In its entirety the Snowden story system is a hard thing to hang a prize on. But we know what some of its principles are. In November of last year Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (there is no larger figure in Pulitzer lore) complained about the way the story system was working. Snowden had made a mistake by not coming to him, Woodward said. He, Bob of Watergate, would have known how to bring order and narrative to the revelations.

Gellman reacted swiftly, and in public, with no hestitation about taking on an icon of the Post:

"I can't explain why Bob would insult the source who brought us this extraordinary story or the exemplary work of his colleagues in pursuing it," Gellman said in an email to HuffPost.

"The 'others' he dismissed include [The Washington Post's] Greg Miller, Julie Tate, Carol Leonnig, Ellen Nakashima, Craig Whitlock, Craig Timberg, Steven Rich and Ashkan Soltani -- all of whom are building on the Snowden archive with me to land scoop after scoop," Gellman continued. "I won't get into why Snowden came to me or didn't come to Bob. But the idea of keeping Snowden anonymous, or of waiting for one 'coherent' story, suggests that Bob does not understand my source or the world he lived in."