Washington: The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, with a staff of 80 and a daily circulation of 85,000, won the most prestigious of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism awarded on Monday for a series on the high number of deaths resulting from domestic abuse in the state.
The series, titled Till Death Do Us Part, was awarded the gold medal for public service, the first Pulitzer the paper has won since 1925. It is the first time in five years that the prize has gone to such a small newspaper.
The New York Times won in the international reporting category for “courageous front-line reporting and vivid human stories” on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The newspaper’s coverage was the result of an expansive and dangerous effort. It included foreign correspondents, science writers and a video journalist (the paper’s winning entry included two online videos). Photographer Daniel Berehulak won the award for feature photography for a series of poignant portraits, shot across months, documenting Ebola’s deadly spread in West Africa.
The Times also won the prize for investigative reporting, for a series by Eric Lipton on aggressive efforts by lobbyists and lawyers to push state attorneys general to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators to benefit their clients. It shared the prize with The Wall Street Journal, which won for a project that revealed to Americans previously confidential data “on the motivations and practices of their health care providers.”
The Los Angeles Times won two Pulitzers. Diana Marcum won the feature writing prize for her stories from the Central Valley of California on how the state’s drought affected the lives of residents. The newspaper also won the criticism prize, for Mary McNamara’s writings on television and culture.
Bloomberg News won its first Pulitzer, for explanatory journalism. It went to Zachary R. Mider, for his reporting on how US corporations dodge taxes and get away with it. Speaking in the newsroom Monday, Matthew Winkler, the emeritus editor-in-chief, said that when he told the company’s founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, that Bloomberg News had won its first Pulitzer, Bloomberg replied, partly in jest, “It’s about time.”
The Seattle Times won the breaking news award, for its account of a deadly landslide, and for its follow-up reporting.
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Anthony Doerr’s best-selling historical novel, All the Light We Cannot See, which unfolds in Europe during the Second World War, and follows a blind French girl who joins the resistance movement and an orphaned German boy who gets swept up in the Nazi occupation. Doerr’s novel was a finalist for the National Book Award.
In general nonfiction, the prize went to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which explores how climate change is accelerating the mass extinction of species. The drama prize went to Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis.
The winning series on domestic abuse by The Post and Courier, its executive editor Mitch Pugh said in an interview, began when reporters saw annual statistics that ranked South Carolina the No 1 state in the country in the rate of women killed by men.
“The discussion around the table in the newsroom was why is that,” Pugh said. “We’ve written about it every year, but we’ve never done the deep dive.”
That prompted an eight-month investigation, driven by a body of data that sought to establish what the deaths might have in common. “This series,” he said, “has made women’s lives in South Carolina better and safer.” The state Legislature has fast-tracked legislation that seeks to remedy the problems the newspaper identified, he said.
The prize for breaking news photography went to the staff of the St Louis Post-Dispatch for “powerful images of the despair and anger in Ferguson” after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, last summer. The shooting prompted protests that roiled the area for weeks.
There were roughly 1,200 journalism entries, Mike Pride, the Pulitzer administrator, said in announcing the awards, which are now in their 99th year. There were also 1,400 books, 200 music compositions and 100 plays considered. Two categories, investigative reporting and feature writing, were opened to magazines this year, which prompted 60 additional entries; Jennifer Gonnerman was a finalist in the feature category for an article she wrote for The New Yorker on the imprisonment of a young man at the Rikers Island jail complex.
