The New York Times won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for its reporting on Africa and for an investigative series on loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans and corporations to avoid paying taxes. In a sign of the changing media landscape, two primarily online news outlets, The Huffington Post and Politico, won their first Pulitzer Prizes.þþþAlso notable this year was the absence of prizes in two categories. The Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards, did not name a winner in the editorial writing category. More notably, the judges declined to name a winner for the highly coveted prize for fiction. The last time no winner was named for fiction was in 1977. þþThe Philadelphia Inquirer, which like many regional newspapers has struggled lately with a decline in print advertising revenue and changes in ownership, won the award for public service, among the most prestigious in journalism. The Inquirer’s winning series focused on the pervasive, child-against-child violence in Philadelphia’s schools. þþ“After all this newsroom has gone through in the last three or four years,” said The Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischnowski. “Bankruptcy, being owned by hedge fund managers, the downsizing, so much that our staff had no control over. This is an absolute crowning achievement to their dedication and commitment to excellence.” þþThe winning journalism articles this year covered many of the biggest news topics of 2011, including an award to Sara Ganim, 24, and The Patriot-News staff in Harrisburg, Pa., for local reporting on the Penn State sexual abuse scandal. þþIn the arts, the winners included Quiara Alegría Hudes, who took the prize for drama for her play “Water by the Spoonful,” and the late Manning Marable for “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” which won the history prize. þþThe Tuscaloosa News won in the breaking news category for its coverage of the deadly tornado that devastated that Alabama city last year. The judges cited the paper’s use of “social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates.” þþIn 2009 the Pulitzers, now in their 96th year, expanded to include online-only news sites, and the awards to Politico and The Huffington Post reflect the emerging power of Web-based journalism as it competes with legacy newspapers. þþThe two largest newspapers by Monday-to-Friday circulation in the United States — The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — did not win awards. þþPolitico, started by two veterans of The Washington Post, publishes a daily newspaper but is best known for its Web site. It won for Matt Wuerker’s cartoons, which highlighted partisan political divides. þþ“I work with old media — pen and ink on watercolor paper and watercolor — same as a cartoonist in the mid-1800s,” Mr. Wuerker said in a telephone interview. þþThe Huffington Post, started in 2005 by Arianna Huffington and Andrew Breitbart, among others, won the national reporting prize for a series on wounded veterans written by a longtime war correspondent, David Wood. Called “Beyond the Battlefield,” Mr. Wood’s work first appeared as a 10-part series online and was later expanded into an e-book. þþShortly after The Huffington Post’s award was announced, the Web site’s editorial director, Howard Fineman, sent a celebratory e-mail to dozens of his colleagues in the news media. þþ“His profound series on wounded vets was a milestone for the vets themselves, but also for online journalism,” Mr. Fineman wrote of Mr. Wood and his work. þþIraq war veterans’ struggling to adjust to life back home was also a winning topic for Craig F. Walker, whose feature photographs won for The Denver Post. Mr. Walker also won in that category in 2010. Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse won the top prize for breaking-news photography for a photo of that showed a young girl in the aftermath of a bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan. þþThe winner in the music category, Kevin Puts’s “Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts,” also relates to war, in this case World War I. þþOne of the oldest American news outlets, the 166-year-old Associated Press, took one of two investigative reporting prizes for its series on the New York Police Department’s covert intelligence gathering in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. þþThe other investigative prize went to The Seattle Times for its reporting on a Washington State governmental body that put patients on methadone. þþNo newspaper won more than two awards. David Kocieniewski, a business reporter for The New York Times, won the prize for explanatory journalism for his series “But Nobody Pays That,” on tax avoidance, and Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times was cited for his coverage of famine and conflict in East Africa. þþMr. Gettleman nominated himself for the award, and he beat out other Times reporters nominated for their coverage of the Japanese tsunami. While “some reporters might have felt his editors knew best” about the nomination, said Joseph Kahn, The Times’s foreign editor, “Jeffrey put himself forward for the Pulitzers — and for that, Jeffrey, bless your heart.” þþEli Sanders, a reporter at The Stranger, a weekly based in Seattle, won in the category of feature writing. A Chicago Tribune columnist, Mary Schmich, won the commentary prize for her writing on Chicago, while Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe won the award for criticism for his movie reviews. þþThe judges decided to move the late Manning Marable’s biography “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” from the biography to the history category, in which it won the top honor. In the biography category, John Lewis Gaddis won for “George F. Kennan: An American Life.” þþBut it was the absence of an award for fiction that was perhaps the most shocking result of the committee’s voting. A winning book can be an instant boost to sales and is one of the most closely watched awards in the publishing industry. Finalists in the category included “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008. þþJonathan Galassi, the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said he was “shellshocked” by the lack of a winner in fiction. þþ“It’s a missed opportunity,” he said. “Awards are very important to focus attention on books. So when one isn’t given, it’s a missed boat, and I’m sad about that.” þ
Source: NY Times
