Small paper wins Pulitzer

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The Bristol Herald Courier, a small paper in the coalfields of Appalachia, beat out journalism’s powerhouses to win the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for uncovering a scandal in which Virginia landowners were deprived of millions in natural gas royalties.

The seven-reporter daily was honored for what many regard as an endangered form of journalism in this age of wrenching newspaper cutbacks — aggressive reporting on local issues.

The Washington Post received four Pulitzers — for international reporting on Iraq, feature writing, commentary and criticism. The New York Times won three — for national reporting, for explanatory reporting, and for investigative reporting for collaborating with the fledgling nonprofit news service ProPublica for a story on the life-and-death decisions made by New Orleans doctors during Hurricane Katrina.

The ProPublica prize — and an editorial cartooning award for the self-syndicated Mark Fiore, whose work appears on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site SFGate.com — represented a victory for new media in a competition long dominated by ink-on-newsprint.

ProPublica, a two-year-old organization based in New York with around 30 employees, is bankrolled by charitable foundations, staffed by distinguished veteran journalists and devoted to doing the kind of big investigative journalism projects many newspapers have found too expensive. It offers many of its stories to traditional news organizations, free of charge.

The Pulitzer Board also recognized the way newspapers are branching out with new media. The Seattle Times employed Twitter and e-mail alerts to help inform readers about a deadly shooting and used the social media tool Google Wave to encourage reader participation.

The Pulitzers opened their doors wider in recent years to online-only material. The changes reflect the seismic shifts going on in the industry over the past decade, with readers getting their news online at all hours, in a never-ending news cycle.

Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said there were about 100 online entries from 50 sites this year, up from 65 entries last year.

A prize for investigative reporting also went to the Philadelphia Daily News for exposing a rogue police narcotics squad.

The Seattle Times staff was honored in the breaking-news category for its coverage of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee shop.

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