Kendrick Lamar makes Pulitzer history
Chronicle staff is finalist in breaking news for its coverage of Harvey
NEW YORK — The New York Times and the New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal with reporting that galvanized the #MeToo movement and set off a worldwide reckoning over sexual misconduct in the workplace.
The Times and the Washington Post took the award in the national reporting category for their coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.
The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif., received the breaking news reporting award for coverage of the wildfires that swept through California wine country last fall, killing 44 people and destroying thousands of homes. The Houston Chronicle staff was a finalist in the same category for its coverage of Hurricane Harvey.
The Washington Post also won the investigative reporting prize for revealing decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. The Republican former judge denied the accusations, but they figured heavily in Doug Jones’ victory as the first Democrat elected to the Senate from the state in decades.
Rapper Lamar honored
One of the biggest surprises of the day came in the nonjournalism categories when rap star Kendrick Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer for music, becoming the first nonclassical or nonjazz artist to win the prize. Lamar won the prize for music for his pointed, defiant album, “DAMN.”
Lamar is not only the first rapper to win the award since the Pulitzers expanded to music in 1943, but he is also the first winner who is not a classical or jazz musician.
“The time was right,” Dana Canedy, the administrator of the prizes, said in an interview after the winners were announced. “We are very proud of this selection. It means that the jury and the board judging system worked as it’s supposed to — the best work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.”
She added: “It shines a light on hip-hop in a completely different way. This is a big moment for hip-hop music and a big moment for the Pulitzers.”
Though his work is often serious — and searing —Lamar, a dense and bruising lyricist, has managed to become a pop-cultural juggernaut as well, performing during halftime of this year’s college football national championship and overseeing the soundtrack for “Black Panther.”
The Pulitzers, American journalism’s most prestigious awards, reflected a year of unrelenting news and unprecedented challenges for U.S. media, as Trump repeatedly branded reporting “fake news” and called journalists “the enemy of the people.”
In announcing the journalism prizes, Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said the winners “uphold the highest purpose of a free and independent press, even in the most trying of times.”
“Their work is real news of the highest order, executed nobly, as journalism was always intended, without fear or favor,” she said.
A string of stories in the Times and the Washington Post shined a light on Russian interference in the presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign and transition — ties now under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The president has branded the investigation a “witch hunt.”
The Pulitzer judges commended the two newspapers for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest.”
In stories that appeared within days of each other in October, the Times and the New Yorker reported that movie mogul Weinstein faced allegations of sexual harassment and assault from a multitude of women in Hollywood going back decades and had secretly paid settlements to keep the claims from becoming public.
The judges said the Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow produced “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.”
Small budget, big impact
In the other artistic categories, the award for fiction went to “Less,” by Andrew Sean Greer, a globe-trotting chronicle of an aging novelist confronting middle age, career disappointments and problems in love. “Cost of Living,” an off-Broadway play by Martyna Majok, won the prize for drama.
The nonfiction prize went to “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” a book by James Foreman Jr. that traced the history of contemporary criminal justice. A life of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Prairie Fires,” was named the prizewinner for biography.
In other journalistic categories, the Arizona Republic and USA Today Network won the explanatory reporting prize for a multiformat look at the challenges and consequences of building the Mexican border wall that was a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. The project included footage from a helicopter flight along the entire 2,000-mile border, a podcast and a virtual reality component.
The local reporting award went to the Cincinnati Enquirer for “a riveting and insightful” narrative and video about the heroin epidemic in the area. The paper deployed more than four dozen reporters and photographers for an intense dive into the drug’s toll over one week.
Work like that and the Press Democrat’s wildfire coverage show “you don’t have to have a huge budget to have a big impact,” Canedy said.
Charlottesville photo
Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel Mogato of Reuters won the international reporting award for their coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly crackdown on drugs, and the news agency’s photographers received the feature photography prize for their images of the plight of Rohingya refugees who have fled Myanmar.
The breaking news photography award went to Ryan Kelly of the Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Va., who captured the moment a car plowed into counterprotesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in the Virginia college town. The car killed one of the counterdemonstrators, Heather Heyer.
Kelly made the photo on his last day at the newspaper before moving on to a job at a brewery. In a text Monday, Kelly described the prize as an “incredible honor” but added: “Mostly I’m still heartbroken for Heather Heyer’s family and everybody else who was affected by that tragic violence.”
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a freelance writer for GQ magazine, took the feature writing award for a profile of Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist convicted of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.
The commentary award went to John Archibald of Alabama Media Group in Birmingham, Ala., for pieces on politics, women’s rights and other topics. Art critic Jerry Saltz of New York magazine won the criticism award.
Andie Dominick of the Des Moines Register received the editorial writing prize for pieces about the consequences of privatizing Iowa’s administration of Medicaid.
Freelance writer Jake Halpern and freelance cartoonist Michael Sloan were awarded the editorial cartooning prize for a graphic narrative in the New York Times about a family of refugees fearing deportation.