
Susan Fowler's Uber Expose Should Win a Pulitzer - GCA10
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2017/06/14/susan-fowlers-uber-expose-should-win-a-pulitzer/#4a2a8c862230
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wand3r
If a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built
something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google
or Uber. Fowler did something great and it was powerful despite not being her
life's focus. There are journalists who are as good as Fowler is at
technology. I dont think a Pulitzer is the venue to recognize Susan's work,
nor do I think she would win. I do think we should recognize her writing, and
believe she has already had a meaningful impact

~~~
smt88
> _built something interesting_

This is really under-selling what Susan Fowler did. She exposed and reformed a
massive, multibillion-dollar company with a single essay. How many journalists
have done that?

Some, certainly. But not many.

~~~
nxsynonym
She should be recognized for the work she did, but awarding the pulitzer to
this is a reach.

I see this as a media-train hop. If this same situation had happened in a
multibillion-dollar financial company that didn't have as many subsequent PR
issues, would we be praising her as high?

I'm not trying to take any thing away from her. I want Uber to crash and burn
and be forgotten. I want her to receive as much as possible in terms of
justice. What I DON'T want is for this to be spun into click-bait PR for the
pulitzer, and tangentially - Uber. What about the millions of women who get
harassed daily but work for less "important" companies? Shouldn't they be
considered potential pulitzer winners for their blog posts and facebook
statuses?

The only reason anybody cares is because Uber is A Big Name. This will not
change her life for the better. Uber will continue doing as it has been doing.
The issue will not be solved. But these articles will get clicked on.

~~~
ameister14
I don't know if you are aware of who Pulitzer was, or what the award is about,
but 'a media-train hop' often describes what wins the pulitzer pretty well.

~~~
nxsynonym
So just keep on keeping on then?

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logandavis
An interesting idea. Fowler certainly deserves credit for her work. As the
author correctly notes, it was not only a courageous thing to publish, but
also an impressive piece of writing.

On an unrelated note, the experience of reading this article for me was
absolutely destroyed by the Forbes ad-block-blocker and the ad-first design of
their article view. There were a couple of autoplaying video ads and one
particularly pernicious scroll-locking ad on the sidebar to the right. Forbes
is one of the very worst offenders in web monetization, as they demand you
turn off AdBlock and then serve you a garbage reading experience (usually of a
poorly written article by an unpaid or low-paid "contributor"). Every time I
visit their website, I feel a sudden urge to start espousing Ev William's
gospel that Something Must Be Done about content monetization on the internet,
before Futurama becomes reality:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8)

~~~
GCA10
Author here ... I feel your pain, every day.

~~~
CamperBob2
Must be incredibly frustrating for you. Forbes is a prestigious outlet, a
place where you _should_ be proud to publish your work... yet they go out of
their way to make it a huge hassle to read it.

I wish you had other options. :(

~~~
GCA10
That's gracious, thanks. Still, each writing home has its own mix of +/-. The
overall Forbes environment offers fast turnaround, editorial freedom and
sizable readership. And it pays! Getting 80% of my top five priorities in one
stop is about as good as it ever gets.

Still, writing with fewer ads has its appeal, too. I'll mix things up every
now and then with some postings for Quora, Technology Review, WSJ, etc., which
fill in other circles in life's Venn diagram.

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redm
I only associated Pulitzers with journalists, reporters, writers, and other
professionals in that vein. It's a fascinating new era where anyone (not just
professionals) could be eligible because of the Web and its ability to connect
people.

~~~
Brockenstein
So you take a previous Pulitzer prize winning piece and the one variable you
change is the author isn't a official journalist™ and now it's not Pulitzer
worthy?

I would like to be believe the Pulitzer Prize should recognize exceptional
work and the fact that exceptional work can come from anywhere shouldn't
really be a problem.

~~~
Eridrus
To me, good journalism tries to discover new facts and synthesize the existing
information available, which doesn't exactly seem like what Susan Fowler did
when she wrote about her personal experience.

So, if the goals of the Pulitzer prize were to reward good journalism, I do
not think this would be a good choice.

However, if the goals of the Pulitzer is to reward good writing that has an
impact, regardless of whether it is journalism™ or not, then this seems like a
good fit.

I feel like the Pulitzer prize leans towards the former though, if you look at
the National Reporting Pulitzer this year, it went to WaPo for some Trump
reporting, which AFAICT has had no impact whatsoever.

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danial
The Forbes article references the article with this useless link:
[http://www.linkedin.com/today/](http://www.linkedin.com/today/)

Here is the correct link:
[https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-
on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-
strange-year-at-uber)

~~~
GCA10
Author here ... Thanks for the catch. I just repaired the article link so that
it works, too.

------
sjg007
I think it will be decided by the committee whether she gets the Pulitzer or
not. Certainly there's a lot of paper out there around uber that contributes
to the impact. But her commentary also has larger implications and in some
sense reflects for better or worse society at large. We see it in the Senate
confirmations and in the Congressional inquiries where members of Congress and
the Senate are accused of being hysterical or otherwise out of order. We have
a president who bragged about sexual assault. So it doesn't matter if she's a
journalist or not.. she brought a spotlight to bear on an issue we largely
ignore which is about the treatment of women.

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tptacek
Jack Schafer's piece on the superficiality of the Pulitzers comes to mind[1].
Awarding one to Fowler might be a decent corrective.

[1]:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/04/so_you_won_a_pulitzer.html)

~~~
shawn-butler
Yes awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama certainly did wonders.

It would be better to simply not award one if there is no actually worthy work
rather than pander to cultural whims.

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shruubi
Susan Fowlers piece was powerful, and definitely deserving of some kind of
award/commendation, but I'm not sure if a Pulitzer is the right kind of award.
My understanding is the Pulitzer is for investigative journalism, which I
wouldn't call her article purely because the intent was not to embed yourself
into Uber for a year and research/experience all the messed up things that
went on with the intent to publish an expose.

Also, and maybe I have the wrong impression from TV/Movies, but I was under
the impression that the Pulitzer usually gets awarded to investigative
journalists who expose corruption/scandals on a larger scale than this.

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6stringmerc
Great example of a Personal Essay struggling with Truth and Context in ways
that resonate with others. It's quite easy to dismiss a Person / Former
Employee Complaints with "Oh that's just your experience, it's not a _real_
problem" but it's not Honest[1]. There's merit in sharing personal truths by
way of anecdote. Change can follow.

[1] Hysterical delivery, too much emotion, swearing, or just bad writing can
ruin a piece's impact before it gets to its message, but when done with great
craft, it's a sight to behold.

------
711seveneleven
Disclaimer: I am not a writer and don't know anything about the Pulitzer, or
even the criteria/categories, so my comment is genuinely curious here:

I'm not trying to downplay the importance and impact of Fowler's work,
however, it seems a bit weird to me to award a Pulitzer using any of its
existing categories. (Whether or not a new category should be created for her
or whether an existing category's criteria be changed to allow for her work is
a separate matter entirely).

The reason being is that I feel (with my admittedly complete amateurish
opinion here) is that journalism as a craft should deal with the nature of
third-party and objective investigating and reporting. There is a huge
objective nature to journalism. Oftentimes, the expose or journalistic work
undertaken by the journalist is about a third-party occurrence or
individual(s), not about the journalist themselves.

Journalism is a noble profession. Example: War journalists. Soldiers risk
their lives for their country; journalists risk their lives for something even
less than that: a story. The story is almost never about the hardships the
journalist undertook to report on such a story, only how those hardships
affected others. Not the journalist themselves. They are removed and external
to the story. Out of the picture frame, so to speak. The journalist recognizes
that they are simply an external observer, with the key difference between
themselves and who they report on is that they have luckily been blessed with
the platform, the podium, from which their voice can be heard. They have the
means to speak to the masses, and they must speak, but not for themselves. For
others. Those that are unheard. It's not "I was rained on for three days
straight camping out in the mountainside" it's "THEY were rained on for three
days camping out in the mountainside".

My point behind all this is that at the heart of it, while Fowler's work was
certainly impactful and shed light on a lot of issues at Uber/tech, it was not
really journalism. There was no research and no investigation done into the
treatment of women at Uber, other than a brief mention of her chatting with
other women at the company who experienced a similar situation with the same
manager she had. Other than that, it was mostly what happened to her.
Arguably, I would feel like this should disqualify her even for the Public
Service Pulitzer (which is usually awarded to newspapers, not individuals
anyways), as the philosophy of Fowler's blog did not seem be in line with what
I would consider to be journalism: the service of lending a voice to the
voiceless. She wasn't speaking for others so much as she was speaking for
herself.

Does that matter? After all, can't you say that a lot of external good came
out of her personal blog on her personal experiences? I think it matters. I
think journalism should remain objective and external to the reporter. There's
too much of a conflict of interest and incentive to embellish details
otherwise, when speaking and reporting for yourself and your benefit.

Tangential to this point is the fact that this story "fell into her lap" by
virtue of it happening to her. She didn't seek out this story, something that
was hidden in view. She merely recounted her experience. I'd give more
credence to her blog as journalism if she made a marked effort to make the
story more than just about her, even though the harassment happened to her as
well.

I'm not trying to discount her story for a Pulitzer by virtue of Fowler not
being a journalist, I am arguing on a philosophical level, a recount of
something that happened to you is not journalism.

~~~
hlc
well put

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supercanuck
If Silicon Valley technologists were on the case, we'd still be waiting on
"tangible" data indicating there was a problem to begin with.

~~~
pc86
Too bad Fowler herself is a "Silicon Valley technologist."

------
mohamedattahri
With all due respect to Susan Fowler and her courage, I think this would be an
insult to investigative journalism.

~~~
GCA10
Article author here ....

Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article
that ran between the headline and the comments section, but just in case ...
In paragraph 10 of the story, I observe:

"It would be hard for a single blog post, no matter how detailed, to compete
in the Pulitzers' investigative reporting category, where winners tend to be
multi-part series that involve resource-intensive data collection. But the
Pulitzers' public-service category is more fluid."

More broadly, the grand old prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc.) are wrestling with
ways to update their century-old formats to match the world we live in. Any
effort to stretch old boundaries will be at least slightly controversial. Even
so, it's a more interesting world if the Nobel Prize for literature stretches
to include Bob Dylan than if it doesn't. In the same way, starting to think
about how/where to recognize the very best of the blogosphere in the Pulitzers
is a conversation worth having.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
> Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article
> that ran between the headline and the comments section...

Grade A snark like that is how we know this is a Pulitzer-winning journalist.

~~~
shawn-butler
Snark deserves nothing but derision.

I can't think of a single redeeming value of snark to be honest. It's
facetious, dishonest and toxic. It's not even good comedy.

