Washington Post takes Pulitzer for riot coverage
Ukraine journalists get special citation for reporting on war
NEW YORK — The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism Monday for its coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, an attack on democracy that was a shocking start to a tumultuous year that also saw the end of the United States’ longest war, in Afghanistan.
The Post’s extensive reporting, published in a sophisticated interactive series, found numerous problems and failures in political systems and security before, during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the newspaper’s own backyard.
The Pulitzer Prizes also awarded a special citation to journalists of Ukraine, acknowledging their “courage, endurance and commitment” in covering the ongoing Russian invasion that began earlier this year. Last August, the Pulitzer board granted a special citation to Afghan journalists who risked their safety to help produce news stories and images from their own war-torn country.
The intersection of health, safety and infrastructure played a prominent role among the winning projects.
The Chicago Tribune and The Better Government Association won the local reporting award for “The Failures Before the Fires,” the watchdog and newspaper’s investigation into fatal fires that exposed flaws in Chicago’s building code enforcement and the permanent scars left on survivors.
The Tampa Bay Times won the investigative reporting award for “Poisoned,” its in-depth look into a polluting lead factory, while The Miami Herald took the breaking news award for its work covering the deadly Surfside condo tower collapse.
The Tribune and the BGA joined forces on the project in November 2019. In March, the pandemic hit and the project was put on hold until fall 2020, and published in April 2021.
Five Getty Images photographers were awarded one of the two prizes in breaking news photography for their coverage of the Capitol riot. The other prize awarded in breaking news photography went to Los Angeles Times correspondent and photographer Marcus Yam, for work related to the fall of
Kabul.
The U.S. pullout and resurrection of the Taliban’s grip on Afghanistan permeated across categories, with The New York Times winning in the international reporting category for reporting challenging official accounts of civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pulitzer Prizes, administered by Columbia University and considered the most prestigious in American journalism, recognize work in 15 journalism categories and seven arts categories. This year’s awards, which were livestreamed, honored work produced in 2021. The winner of the public service award receives a gold medal, while winners of each of the other categories get $15,000.
The prize for explanatory reporting went to Quanta Magazine, with the board highlighting the work of Natalie Wolchover, for a long-form piece about the James Webb space telescope, a $10 billion engineering effort to gain a better understanding about the origins of the universe.
The New York Times also won in the national reporting category, for a project looking at police traffic stops that ended in fatalities, and
Salamishah Tillet, a contributing critic-at-large at the Times, won the criticism award.
A story that used graphics in comic form to tell the story of Zumrat Dawut, a Uyghur woman who said she was persecuted and detained by the Chinese government as part of systemic abuses against her community, brought the illustrated reporting and commentary prize to Fahmida Azim, Anthony Del Col, Josh Adams and Walt Hickey of Insider.
Jennifer Senior of The
Atlantic won the award for feature writing, for a piece marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks through a family’s grief.
Melinda Henneberger of The Kansas City Star won for commentary, for columns about a retired police detective accused of sexual abuse and those who said they were assaulted calling for justice.
The editorial writing prize went to Lisa Falkenberg, Michael Lindenberger, Joe Holley and Luis Carrasco of the Houston Chronicle, for a piece that
called for voting reforms and exposed voter suppression tactics.
The prize for feature photography went to Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, Amit Dave and Danish Siddiqui of Reuters for photos of the COVID19 toll in India. Siddiqui, 38, who won a 2018 Pulitzer in the same category, was killed in Afghanistan in July while documenting fighting between Afghan forces and the Taliban.