Pulitzer winners named in New York
NEW YORK
Daniel Berehulak was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, showing a medical staff carrying James Dorbor, suspected of having Ebola, into a treatment facility in Liberia. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times via AP
Columbia University recognized newspaper coverage of local calamities and international emergencies in the 99th annual Pulitzer Prizes on April 21.The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina, recently in the news for its coverage of Walter Scott’s death, received the Pulitzer for public service for an earlier series of stories about domestic violence, entitled “Till Death Do Us Part.”
The Seattle Times staff won for breaking news coverage of a landslide and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch photography staff won for their images of Ferguson, Missouri.
The Washington Post won the national reporting section for Carol D. Leonnig’s “smart, persistent coverage” of Secret Service shortcomings.
First for Wall Street Journal
Even the Wall Street Journal newsroom won a Pulitzer, its first since Rupert Murdoch acquired the newspaper in 2007. The Journal shared the investigative reporting prize for its project called “Medicare Unmasked” with the New York Times, which won for a probe into Washington lobbyists.
Its biggest rival, the Times, won three Pulitzers, more than any other news organization.
Along with the investigative award, the Times won the international reporting prize, for what the judges called “courageous front-line reporting” about Ebola, and the feature photography prize, for freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak’s coverage of the disease’s spread in West Africa.
The Pulitzers are generally considered to be the most prestigious prizes in American journalism. In newsrooms like the Los Angeles Times, staffers gathered to hear the winners read aloud.
Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara won the Pulitzer for criticism. Her colleague Diana Marcum won the prize for feature writing.
Bloomberg News, this year’s sole non-newspaper winner, celebrated its first Pulitzer ever, after becoming eligible several years ago. Reporter Zachary R. Mider received the prize in the explanatory reporting category for detailing how “corporations dodge taxes and why lawmakers and regulators have a hard time stopping them.”
The news organization’s founder, Michael Bloomberg, congratulated Mider in front of hundreds of colleagues.
The Pulitzers’ arts categories recognized Anthony Doerr’s novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the musical composition “Anthracite Fields” by Julia Wolfe and poetry by Gregory Pardlo.
They also honored Elizabeth A. Fenn’s history “Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People,” David I. Kertzer’s biography “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s nonfiction work “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Magazine journalism
For the first time, magazine journalism was eligible in two categories. There were no winners, but the New Yorker was a finalist in one of the categories.
The commentary winner was Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle, for what the judges called “vividly-written, groundbreaking columns about grand jury abuses.”
Other winners included Kathleen Kingsbury of the Boston Globe for editorial writing, Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News for editorial cartooning and the Daily Breeze in Torrance, California, for local reporting about school district corruption.
The sole digital media finalist was liberal web site the Daily Kos, in the editorial cartooning category.
The Huffington Post and InsideClimate News have earned Pulitzers in past years, despite lack of print components.
Mike Pride, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said that although all the winners, except Bloomberg, hailed from print newsrooms this year, “The digital components of their work is becoming more and more sophisticated. Newspapers know where the future is.”