Sarasota Journalist, Paige St. John Awarded Pulitzer Prize

SARASOTA --When it comes to journalism, good work is often soon forgotten. Long hours and plenty of sweat equity is put in, but then it is published into the wind-tunnel with a shorter lifespan than yellow bananas, where it competes for the shrinking market of people who actually read, most of whom have greater interest in who's winning Dancing With the Stars than the things that impact their daily lives. This week, a local investigative journalist's series received a rare dose of immortality.

Paige St. John, an investigative reporter for the Sarasota Herald Tribune, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism, a truly remarkable and well-deserved accomplishment. Whether they read or not, most everyone has heard of the Pulitzer, a prestigious award created by publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer and administered by the Columbia University School of Journalism, and it is unlikely that Ms. St. John's name will ever again be announced without her association to it being added. She is now, and will forever be: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paige St. John – as author Saul Bellow once pointed out (himself a recipient), it is the ultimate advertising coup for the foundation.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Paige St. john

The award is bestowed in 21 artistic categories including fiction, plays, poetry and even editorial cartooning. But in the journalism world, the Pulitzer is king – the Oscar, the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby rolled into one. And top dog amongst the 10 fields for writers of journalism is the investigative award. It is the I came, I saw, I conquered trophy for those whose work have brought down governments, exposed massive corruption and even sent people to the can. In other words, it's a big deal.

Ms. St. John's exhaustive series, which completely exposed the Florida property insurance industry for the sham racket that it is, was certainly deserving of the honor. Chasing crooked insurers and re-insurers across the state and even to places like Monte Carlo and Bermuda to get the skinny on offshore companies and find out what they were saying to each other at their exclusive outings, St. John depicted a business model not unlike that of a rigged-casino – chalk full of offshore accounts, bogus shell companies and orgiastic profiteering.

The pieces were supported by tons of easily digestible data; concrete stats in the form of simple, yet telling, charts and graphs. There were multiple inside sources and plentiful expert analysis. By the end of the series, you understood that the entire game was a house of cards – an engineered scam potentially more dangerous to Floridians than the catastrophic storms they're seeking protection from. It was brilliant reporting and I'm glad that it was properly recognized.

The only element missing thus far is someone bringing the hammer down. As St. John herself lamented recently at a public forum at New College, things have gotten worse not better with regard to pending legislation in Tallahassee that would open the industry up for even more destabilization, while hooking residents with much higher costs. I sincerely hope that the additional attention given to the series via the award might induce someone to dust off the handcuffs, craft some indictments and initiate some white-collar perp walks. It's the ending this story deserves.

The award also brings to light the importance of such reporting, a field that is shrinking every year as newspapers cut staff and reduce coverage. For all the talk of the blogoshpere and various news hubs like Salon.com and the Huffington Post, the fact is, very little first generation “reporting” is done outside of the newsroom at the dailies. The other sites exist primarily to analyze and give comment regarding a story that was broke by someone else.

Wikileaks has shown the power of the net to get information to the masses, but dumping troves of raw data is not the most effective way to disseminate important stories. It has instead become a breaking-off of the process and at a very critical juncture. How many everyday people, or even pundits commentating on the subject, actually read those leaked State Department cables or Iraq/Afghanistan documents? Again, this is where the investigative reporter is indispensable in their role of performing the follow up, asking the right questions and breaking a coherent story.

The Herald Tribune, a subsidiary of The New York Times, is one of only a handful of publications in Florida that has access to the resources for investigations of this magnitude. Investigative reporting is expensive. You've got to put people on a story, often for a year or more, while they're generating very little content for an operation that publishes every single day. There are a multitude of expenses from travel to hosting, and in some cases, even hiding endangered sources.

It is worth noting, that when the Herald Tribune downsized its operation a few years back and the paper (especially the Sunday edition) became notably skinnier, they succeeded in maintaining a very, very good investigative team. In addition to St. John's work, the paper produced an eye-opening series on the escalating gang and drug wars in the troubled Newtown neighborhood and have been on the Sarasota County Public Works Department like a hair shirt, since an employee was indicted on corruption-related charges last month.

Clearly, a newspaper cannot be all wire reports and puff pieces, though that's the easiest and cheapest means of getting out a would-be mullet wrap. Without your local newspaper exposing the crimes and corruptions in our everyday lives, it is clear that most would go both unnoticed and unchanged. But the paper can only do its part, someone has to read it and then get angry enough to demand that something is done. In the case of Paige St. John, she's done her part and then some. I just hope the taxpayers and government officials don't stand for all of the sordid shenanigans she's exposed.