The New York Times received five Pulitzer prizes on Monday for investigative, breaking news and international reporting, feature photography and criticism, leading a field of smaller newspapers in the most coveted awards in the US news industry.
In a year in which online publishers were allowed to compete for the first time, the strength of the award winners showed that journalism still offered tremendous value even as it faces a financial meltdown, said Columbia University, which awards the prizes.
PHOTO: AP
ONLINE OUTLET
The only online outlet to get a mention was politifact.com, a section of the St Petersburg Times, which was recognized for fact-checking of candidates’ assertions in the US presidential campaign.
“The watchdog still barks. The watchdog still bites,” said Sid Gissler, administrator of the prizes. “Who would be doing this day-to-day if we didn’t have newspapers?”
The Las Vegas Sun won the prestigious public-service prize for reporting on the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas strip, while the Los Angeles Times won for explanatory reporting on the growing cost and threat of wildfires.
The New York Times prizes included awards for photography of US President Barack Obama on the campaign trail and for uncovering the sex scandal that led to the resignation of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post won the commentary prize for his columns on Obama’s election campaign.
FICTION
The fiction prize went to Elizabeth Strout, whose book Olive Kitteridge is a collection of stories centered on coastal Maine.
The history prize went to Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, about slaves owned by US president Thomas Jefferson.
Playwright Lynn Nottage won the Pulitzer prize in drama for Ruined, a hard-hitting rape drama set in a Congolese brothel. Douglas Blackmon won the general nonfiction prize for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
The biography prize went to Jon Meacham’s American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.
Nauru has started selling passports to fund climate action, but is so far struggling to attract new citizens to the low-lying, largely barren island in the Pacific Ocean. Nauru, one of the world’s smallest nations, has a novel plan to fund its fight against climate change by selling so-called “Golden Passports.” Selling for US$105,000 each, Nauru plans to drum up more than US$5 million in the first year of the “climate resilience citizenship” program. Almost six months after the scheme opened in February, Nauru has so far approved just six applications — covering two families and four individuals. Despite the slow start —
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