Story broken online wins Pulitzer

This from today’s Cyberjournalist.net, a great site for the insider’s view of the web. “A story first broken on the Internet won a Pulitzer Prize this week — the first time this site believes this has ever happened.

The Willamette Week’s Nigel Jaquiss won the Pulitzer Prize this week for investigative reporting for his work exposing a sexual relationship between former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt and a 14-year-old girl.

After a two-month investigation, the Week sent Goldschmidt a letter summarizing the story the paper had prepared and asked for comment. The next day, Goldschmidt resigned from the state’s board of higher education and the Oregon Electric Utility Co. Fearing the weekly paper would be scooped by the local daily, The Willamette Week published the allegations online.

“Given our weekly production cycle, had we not posted, we might have had a harder time convincing people we broke the story,” Jaquiss says.