Temecula Patch's Parent, HuffPo, Wins Pulitzer

The parent company of Temecula Patch -- and all 800-plus Patch websites countrywide -- won its first Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer went to David Wood for his series, Beyond the Battlefield. As a reward, his bosses bought him a 30-pack of Natural Light. To see a video of it, click on the image above.

The Huffington Post, or the HuffPo, as it's called by fans, has been maligned by media critics for its use of aggregation and volunteer labor from citizen journalists.

Michael Shapiro defends the organization in his Columbia Journalism Review article, "Six Degrees of Aggregation: How the Huffington Post Ate the Internet," when he wrote:

"Huffington Post, which had mastered search-engine optimization and was quick to understand and pounce on the rise of social media, had been at once widely followed but not nearly so widely cited. But that is likely to change now that it can boast of a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting—the rebuttal to every critic who dismissed HuffPost as an abasement to all that was journalistically sacred."

Temecula Patch follows a similar model to the Huffington Post. It generates original content, including local news coverage. It aggregates stories from other media. It links directly to articles in other media. It publishes the works of bloggers, and it uses numerous social media to connect to readers.