HuffPo, Politico Earn First Pulitzers
The list of 2012 winners also include the 24-year-old reporter who exposed the Penn State sex scandal.
| Posted Monday, April 16, 2012, at 4:42 PM
Photo by Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP/Getty Images.
The winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were unveiled Monday at Columbia University. You can check out a full list here.
Among the more notable winners were the Huffington Post's David Wood, who grabbed the award for national reporting for his reporting on the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers who were severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The award was HuffPo's first-ever Pulitzer.
Politico also earned the right to call itself a Pulitzer-winning publication for the first time, thanks to Matt Wuerker's political cartoons.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Sara Ganim and the staff at Pennsylvania's Patriot-News nabbed the award for local reporting for uncovering the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal at Penn State.
Some of the more established outlets didn't leave empty-handed, however. The New York Times won a pair of awards: one for David Kocieniewski's explanatory reporting on how the nation’s wealthiest people and corporations often exploit tax loopholes, and a second for Jeffrey Gettleman's international reporting on famine and conflict in East Africa.
The Associated Press took home one of two awards given out in the investigatory category for Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan, and Chris Hawle's reporting on the NYPD's "clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities." (The second investigatory award went to Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times.)
The award for public service went to the Philadelphia Inquirer for "its exploration of pervasive violence in the city’s schools, using powerful print narratives and videos to illuminate crimes committed by children against children and to stir reforms to improve safety for teachers and students."
The selection committee opted against handing out an award this year in the fiction and editorial writing categories. The three finalists for the fiction category were the late David Foster Wallace's Pale King, Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.
First, let us say congrats to all the winners and nominees. And, now that that's out of the way, let us point you toward Jack Shafer's classic Slate column on why you shouldn't care about the awards.
