NEW YORK — The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes on Monday — the most in its history — including awards for its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and a series exposing shoddy treatment of U.S. war wounded at Walter Reed hospital.
The New York Times received two Pulitzers: one for investigative reporting, for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products from China, and one for explanatory reporting, for examining the ethical issues surrounding DNA testing.
Previously, The Washington Post won as many as four Pulitzers in a single year, in 2006. The record is seven, won by the Times in 2002, mostly for its coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Cheers erupted in the Post newsroom when the prizes were announced. Like many newspapers, the Post is struggling mightily with falling circulation and advertising revenue. It is going through its third round of employee buyouts since 2003.
Post reporter Dana Priest said the Walter Reed story was among the work in which she took the most pride. She and Anne Hull worked on the story for about six months.
“It’s a reminder of what basic journalism can get you involved in,” she said. “At a time when journalism is under this cloud of financial uncertainty, reporters have to stay focused, and if we don’t, we sort of doom people like the Army specialist who lived with the cockroaches in Building 18. We can do better than that.”
In addition to the public-service medal for the Walter Reed expose and the breaking-news award for Virginia Tech, the Post won for national reporting, international reporting, feature writing and commentary.
Series from Denver’s daily newspapers were nominated as finalists.
In the investigative category, Miles Moffeit and Susan Greene of The Denver Post were finalists for their series “Trashing the Truth” on how the loss of DNA evidence in criminal cases can call convictions into question.
In feature writing, Kevin Vaughan of the Rocky Mountain News was a finalist for his series “The Crossing,” on the 1961 Weld County collision of a train and a school bus that killed 20 children.
