AP, Reuters win Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting
New York — The South Florida Sun Sentinel won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for its coverage of the school massacre that killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and the shortcomings in school discipline and security that contributed to the carnage.
The Associated Press won in the international reporting category for documenting the humanitarian horrors of Yemen’s civil war, while The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal received prizes for delving into President Donald Trump’s finances and breaking open the hush-money scandals involving the then-candidate and two women who said they had affairs with him.
The prizes, U.S. journalism’s highest honor, reflected a year when journalism increasingly came under attack.
The Capital Gazette was given a special citation for its coverage and courage in the face of a massacre in its own newsroom in Annapolis, Md. The newspaper published on schedule the day after the shooting claimed five staffers’ lives. It was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history. The man charged in the attack had a longstanding grudge against the paper.
Reuters won an international reporting award for work that cost two of its staffers their liberty: shedding light on a brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims by security forces in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are serving a seven-year sentence after being convicted of violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. Their supporters say the two were framed in retaliation for their reporting.
The AP’s international reporting prize went to a team of journalists who spent a year documenting atrocities and suffering in Yemen, illuminating the human toll of its four-year-old civil war.
As a result of the work by reporter Maggie Michael, photographer Nariman El-Mofty and video journalist Maad al-Zikry, at least 80 prisoners were released from secret detention sites, and the United Nations rushed food and medicine to areas where the AP revealed that people were starving while corrupt officials diverted international food aid.