THE New York Times won four Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including two awards for its reporting on the actions of companies like Apple and Wal-Mart overseas, and another for an examination of the hidden wealth of the Chinese premier’s family.
In a sign of the changing news business, an independent nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn, InsideClimate News, won the prize for national reporting for its coverage of dangers posed by oil pipelines.
The fiction prize, which was not awarded last year, went to Adam Johnson for “The Orphan Master’s Son.” The prize for general nonfiction was awarded to “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America,” by Gilbert King.
The Star Tribune in Minneapolis won two Pulitzers, one for local reporting on the rise in infant deaths at badly regulated day care centers and another for editorial cartooning by Steve Sack. The Wall Street Journal won one Pulitzer Prize for Bret Stephens’s commentary on politics and American foreign policy.
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for Philip Kennicott’s criticism of art and the social forces that underlie it, including an examination of the allure of violence and misfortune in an essay after the Newtown school shootings called “Why Do We Stare?”
The fourth award for The Times went to John Branch for his feature “Snow Fall,” on a fatal avalanche in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, which, the Pulitzer committee noted, was “enhanced by its deft integration of multimedia elements” including extensive video, animation and graphics. This is the third highest number of Pulitzer Prizes that The Times has won in a single year. (It won five in 2009 and seven in 2002.)
The Denver Post won in the breaking news category for its coverage of the theater shootings last summer in Aurora, Colo. The Pulitzer committee recognized how The Post’s reporting staff used social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and video to “capture a breaking story and provide context.” A finalist in the same category was the staff of The Hartford Courant for its coverage of the Newtown school massacre.
The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., received its first Pulitzer, winning in the public service category for its reporting on how off-duty police officers were often speeders who endangered the lives of residents.
The prizes were especially valued in 2012 because so many news organizations were battling their own financial troubles. The Washington Post won one award and was a finalist for four others, even as the company endured a change in executive editors and found its financial situation under scrutiny. In an interview, Mr. Kennicott said that The Post had made sure that he felt that these financial and management changes would not affect his ability to focus on his work.
While the board that administers the Pulitzers started including online-only news sites in its awards in 2009, InsideClimate News.com is by far the smallest of such winners. InsideClimate News described itself as a five-year nonprofit organization financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Marisla Foundation and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Its newsroom currently includes only seven full-time journalists.
David Sassoon, founder and publisher of the news site, said his staff celebrated on a telephone conference call because they work from their homes.
“We’re just thrilled with this recognition,” Mr. Sassoon said in a telephone interview. “It really helps a small outlet like us.” How? “Hopefully we’ll be able to raise more funds, to expand, which is what we want to do.” He joked that now that they have a Pulitzer, “more sources will call us back.”
The publishing industry was watching the fiction award closely after the Pulitzer board declined to award the prize in 2012. In addition to the winner, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” there were two finalists: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” by Nathan Englander, and “The Snow Child,” by Eowyn Ivey. Tom Reiss won the biography prize for “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”
Ayad Akhtar won the drama award for “Disgraced,” a play about a corporate lawyer who long disguises his Pakistani Muslim heritage, and Sharon Olds won the poetry award for “Stag’s Leap.”
- COURTESY: The New York Times