2011 Pulitzer Awards

The New York Times won Pulitzer Prizes on April 18 for its economics commentary and its reporting on Russia, while The Los Angeles Times received the coveted public service Pulitzer and the award for feature photography.

The prizes, which are administered by Columbia University, went to a variety of newspapers and were not concentrated in the hands of one or two publications, as has been the case in recent years.

And for the first time, a prize was awarded to reporting that did not appear in print: ProPublica's online series “The Wall Street Money Machine,” which won for national reporting.

The awards this year included other notable firsts. The Wall Street Journal won its only Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 2007. It was for Joseph Rago's editorial writing on the debate over health care legislation. The Journal received the awards for international reporting and public service in 2007.

Carol Guzy, a photographer from The Washington Post, became the first journalist to win four Pulitzer Prizes. Mr. Guzy shared the award for breaking news photography with other Post photographers, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti, who were cited for their depiction of the devastation from the earthquake in Haiti.

For the first time, the Pulitzer board, which decides on the winners after juries in each category make their recommendations, did not award a prize for breaking news reporting. This was despite the fact that last year included a number of dramatic breaking news events, including the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the earthquake in Haiti, which media organisations mobilised considerable resources to cover. The Pulitzer board did, however, cite four newspapers as finalists in the category: The Chicago Tribune, The Tennessean of Nashville, The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, which were considered a joint entry for their coverage of the Haiti earthquake.

Pulitzers were awarded in 13 journalism categories and seven arts categories.

The prize for fiction went to Jennifer Egan for A Visit From the Goon Squad. Bruce Norris won the award for drama for his play Clybourne Park. The history prize went to Eric Foner for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Ron Chernow won in the biography category for Washington: A Life.

Madame White Snake, by Zhou Long, won for music.

Kay Ryan took the prize for poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. The award for general nonfiction was awarded to Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Public service category

In the public service category for journalism, The Los Angeles Times won for its coverage of city officials in Bell, California, who enriched themselves with enormous pay packages. The articles made the city of Bell infamous and tapped into the anti-government ferment that hit its height last summer.

The paper's editor, Russ Stanton, called the reporting “accountability journalism at its best.”

David Leonhardt of The New York Times won in the commentary category for what the committee said was “his graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions.” The Times' Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry won the prize for international reporting for “their dogged reporting that put a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia, remarkably influencing the discussion inside the country.”

Corporate malfeasance was a theme in the awards this year. ProPublica's winning series by Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein exposed questionable business practices that helped contribute to the country's economic meltdown. The award for investigative reporting went to Paige St. John of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune for exposing how homeowners in Florida were left vulnerable by insurance companies that were on shaky financial footing.

In the feature writing category, Amy Ellis Nutt of The Star-Ledger in Newark won for what the board said was her “deeply probing story” on the mysterious sinking of a scallop fishing vessel, the Lady Mary. Six men drowned.

Not all the prizes involved tragedies. Journalists from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won for their reporting on how doctors worked to save a young boy who was struck with a mysterious disease that attacked his intestine.

The award for criticism went to Sebastian Smee, the art critic for The Boston Globe. The Chicago Sun-Times journalists Frank Main, Mark Konkol and John J. Kim won for local reporting for their “immersive documentation of violence in Chicago neighbourhoods.” Mike Keefe of The Denver Post won for his cartoons that employed “a loose, expressive style to send strong, witty messages.”