Boston, Snowden news stories get Pulitzers
The Washington Post and Guardian U.S. won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, among the most prestigious awards in journalism, for their stories based on National Security Agency documents leaked by the former government contractor Edward Snowden.
Through a series of reports that exposed the NSA’s widespread domestic surveillance program, the Post and Guardian U.S. sparked an international debate on the limits of government surveillance. The papers also came under heavy criticism by the U.S. and British governments, with lawmakers accusing the two papers of compromising national security.
The committee said that it gave the award for the “authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.”
“This is the epitome of important reporting and the epitome of what public service in journalism is all about,” said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, in a telephone interview on Monday afternoon.
The Boston Globe won the breaking news prize for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded at least 260. Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of the blast.
The fiction prize went to Donna Tartt for The Goldfinch, described by the Pulitzer committee as “a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction.”
The prize for general nonfiction was awarded to Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin, a book about a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.
Also notable this year was the absence of a prize in one category. The Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards, did not name a winner in the feature writing category. This was an unusual, but not unprecedented, decision that typically means that no finalist had been able to muster the mandatory majority of votes.
The Washington Post won a second award. Eli Saslow, a staff writer, won the prize for explanatory journalism for a series of stories on American families that rely on the federal food stamp program.
The Post’s awards arrived under the leadership of a new executive editor, Marty Baron, who took the paper’s top job in January 2013, and a new owner, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos, who purchased the newspaper last summer.
Baron said that the two prizes his paper had won were for stories he considered “tremendously important.” The stories which won the public service award, he said, did not “need vindication. The reporting was solid in every way. It delved into an overwhelmingly important subject, one that had been kept secret from the American public.”
Janine Gibson, the editor of Guardian U.S., said they were particularly proud of winning the public service category.
“I think those words say something about what Edward Snowden did, and what the reporters and editors did, in the face of a lot of rhetoric and opposition,” she said.
Though the citation did not name specific reporters, the work was led by Barton Gellman at The Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at Guardian U.S., and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and journalist who worked with both newspapers.