Does the Pulitzer Prize Hate Substack?

And should we care?

I don’t have a good track record when dealing with the Pulitzer folks.

I’ve certainly made an effort. Back in 2022, I begged the Pulitzer board to reconsider its 1965 rejection of Duke Ellington.

Their denial was scandalous. The Pulitzer Board decided to give no prize in music that year, rather than honor Ellington—although its own music jury had recommended him as recipient.

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The timing made it even more shameful.

This all happened a few weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma, and while segregationists were trying to block the Voting Rights bill in the Senate. That was the choice moment when the Pulitzer board firmly adhered to its own history of segregation in its music prize.

So I launched a petition asking the Pulitzer’s current board to revisit this decision. And the positive response to the petition was overwhelming.

I sent an open letter to the Pulitzer board and staff after we reached 10,000 signatures. But they never responded.

I sent a second letter after we surpassed 50,000 signatures. By this time, I had received the support of an impressive roster of famous American composers—including many previous Pulitzer winners.

It was a polite request—just like the previous letter. But I still received no response.

This issue was now a big deal in the music world. So the New York Times wrote a story about my petition. That’s when a Pulitzer administrator finally replied—saying that they would NOT revisit the 1965 decision.

The Pulitzer insiders didn’t respond to me. They didn’t respond to the petition. Instead, the response came in the form of a letter to the New York Times.

That’s curious. The New York Times didn’t launch the petition. They didn’t organize the campaign.

But nobody is surprised when New York media insiders view everything as a conversation among themselves. That’s what I’ve come to expect from the Pulitzer Prize—so, of course, it ignores Substack.

In their world, Substackers don’t deserve a response, let alone awards. In the shrinking inner sanctums of legacy journalism, alt media is a nuisance.

But that was back in 2022. What about now?

Back when I launched the Ellington petition, I had 23,000 subscribers here. Now—less than three years later—almost a quarter of a million people subscribe to The Honest Broker.

There are only seven newspapers in the US with larger subscription numbers. So would the Pulitzer admin still refuse to respond to my letter in 2025?

Probably. The impressive metrics of indie journalism are still just an irritant to those who wish it would go away. And the Pulitzer insiders have a history of ignoring criticism, even of scandalous decisions on their part.

The insult to Duke Ellington is just one more example.

But there’s a bigger issue at play here. Many Pulitzer winners now write on the Substack platform—the only difference is that they received the honor before they broke free from the system.

In fact, the Substack platform in aggregate is now far more powerful and influential than any single newspaper in the world. And it’s getting stronger with each passing month.

So that leads to an obvious question: When will the Pulitzer Prize embrace Substack?

Erik Hoel asked this question a few days ago.

His best guess is that it will take another five years before a Pulitzer goes to a Substack journalist.

That may be an accurate estimate. But it raises another question: Does this even matter anymore?

If the Pulitzer judges had recognized Substack in 2023 or 2024, they would have looked smart and ahead of the curve. They would have demonstrated some awareness of the huge shifts underway in media. But if they wait another five years before embracing the platform, they will just look like Rip Van Winkle—some sleepyhead who finally wakes up.

In fact, that’s precisely what happened with Duke Ellington. The Pulitzer board did give him a special citation in 1999, a full quarter of a century after his death in 1974. They never fixed the 1965 situation—they just covered their ass, and far too late in the game.

If and when the Pulitzer insiders toss some shiny trophies at Substackers it will be pretty much the same thing.

And that’s why alternative media needs to set up its own awards.

We don’t need legitimization from Rip Van Winkle.

In the very near future, the Pulitzer will be forced to respond to the energy and influence of alternative media. It can’t survive if it remains shut out from the vibrancy of these new indie voices.

They really need us more than we need them. That’s already true—they just haven’t figured it out yet.

The situation is similar to what Substack faced when it tried to get tables at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The organization denied the request.

It was actually worse than a denial. The Executive Director of the White House Correspondents’ Association told Substack’s Head of News and Politics Catherine Valent that “Substack would never have a table at the dinner.”

So guess what Substack did?

The company hosted its own media party at the Willard Hotel in the nation’s capital. That was the appropriate response. And when Substack did the same thing the following year—holding its own event—the tables (literally and figuratively) had turned.

“This time legacy media showed up in droves,” reported Jessica Reid Krauss. “No surprise there—mainstream institutions are collapsing, public trust has evaporated, and predictably, the old guard is now slipping into the seductive, profitable terrain of independent media….Career journalists once paid to protect institutional power are now rebranding as renegades.”

That’s a model for how to deal with the Pulitzer Prize and other insider perks in legacy media.

The indie journalists who now work in alternative channels need to build their own ecosystem. That includes awards, meetings, training programs, networking opportunities, and all the rest.

That will be easier than fixing the broken infrastructure of legacy institutions.

If you doubt me, just take a look at the required course offerings at the major journalism programs at US colleges. I did that a few days ago, and I couldn’t find any required courses on launching a Substack or a podcast or a YouTube channel.

How can you prepare students for a media career without teaching them this stuff?

The short answer is: You can’t.

But that’s just one example. The Pulitzer is another. I’d love to see somebody fix it—but I’m not going to waste my energy on that.

Instead let’s build something better from scratch.

So who cares if the Pulitzer people hate me—or if they hate all of Substack. They will respect us soon enough, or maybe even fear us. And if they don’t, they probably should.

But we can’t worry about that. We have our own future to build.