It is hard to define "prestige" in a measurable way. But we can look for proxies.
Using ProQuest's New York Times archive, I ran through the term "Nobel Prize" in two searches. One returned only results of articles that made the front page, the other returned all articles. The results are as follows:
| Decade | Front page | Non-front page | % Front page | % total articles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900-1909 | 47 | 17 | 73% | 0.013% |
| 1910-1919 | 156 | 17 | 90% | 0.029% |
| 1920-1929 | 304 | 70 | 81% | 0.035% |
| 1930-1939 | 1,244 | 79 | 94% | 0.091% |
| 1940-1949 | 781 | 135 | 85% | 0.072% |
| 1950-1959 | 1,609 | 155 | 91% | 0.138% |
| 1960-1969 | 1,607 | 112 | 93% | 0.156% |
| 1970-1979 | 1,948 | 43 | 98% | 0.243% |
| 1980-1989 | 1,806 | 271 | 87% | 0.269% |
| 1990-1999 | 1,545 | 248 | 86% | 0.254% |
| 2000-2009 | 1,505 | 264 | 85% | 0.263% |
Ah, isn't that satisfying! I remain as always deeply dubious of using quantitative methods to understand history, but boy do I love being able to whip that sort of thing up with about 10 minutes' work.
(The percentage of total articles is really the percentage of all articles with the word "the" in them, which is probably close enough to a percentage of total articles.)
OK, so what do we see here? The data — as any serious historian will tell you — requires interpretation, to be made into narrative.
First, we notice that the overall percentage of articles in the New York Times that discuss the Nobel Prize has gone up pretty steadily and fairly linearly over the years. This is despite the fact that the number of articles in the NYT has apparently decreased significantly over time (e.g. in the 1930s there were 1.5m "the" articles; in the 2000s there were 670k).
Second, we notice that of the articles written, a vast majority have always been on the front page. However, there is a noticeable trend. In the first decade of the Nobel Prize, it was featured on the front page significantly fewer times than in later decades. And interestingly, its front-page dominance seems to have peaked in the 1970s and has been on the decline ever since.
This is more or less what I would have guessed: it was pretty prestigious from day one, but got much more so over time. However I think it is actually somewhat less prestigious today than it used to be. How many non-scientists can name a Nobelist in the sciences from the last 10 years? How many can name two? I study this stuff for a living and I barely known any recent Nobelists except for those who I have some reason to know (e.g. I met Frank Wilczek once) or who have been the feature of major news coverage (e.g. Peter Higgs, "God particle," all that). I gave a talk a few weeks ago and was told after the fact that one of the people who asked a question had been a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics. I didn't recognize the name and have since forgotten it — it was not someone I knew of, even as a historian of physics.
The Nobelists in Physics for the 1930s-1960s, while perhaps not "household names," were still pretty familiar and popularly known. Rutherford! Heisenberg! Einstein! Bohr! Fermi! Bethe! Many of these names were well-known before they got the prizes, for various reasons (not surprisingly related to war-making). This period is today known as the "Golden Age of Physics" and that was in part because of increased public knowledge and interest in the subject. (See Daniel Kevles, The Physicists, for much more on this.)
Still, we might consider the biases of the data. It tells us more about what the NYT thinks its audience cares about than what scientists felt about the Prizes. It tells us only what Americans thought about these Prizes. (And the NYT may not be at all that representative of Americans!) Its decline in recent decades might be a reflection of the general decline for enthusiasm in science that marked the 1970s and beyond... or it might be something to do with a decline in full-time science journalism. And, finally, I haven't parsed over the data very closely to see whether there are any weird biases in there, e.g. multiple counts of the same articles for multiple editions of the newspaper early on, years missing from the database, bad OCR, etc. So take this all with a grain of salt.
A deeper study would look at these articles and what they centered around — how they moved from simply reporting about the prizes, to "Nobel Prize-winner" or "Nobel Laureate" being used to describe specific people. We might also look at the breakdown of prizes — sciences versus literature, for example. Even assuming the data is good, there is certainly more than can be done than this very superficial glance, but it is still interesting (to me anyway) nonetheless.
