Washington Post Wins Six Pulitzers in 92nd Awards, Bob Dylan Receives Rare Honor

After being passed over entirely in 2007, the Washington Post swept the 92nd annual Pulitzer Prizes, which were announced Monday at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, winning journalism’s most prestigious award in six categories. The haul is second only to the New York Times’ record of seven Pulitzers following their coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

The Wall Street Journal, which dominated the 2007 Pulitzers, won no awards this year.
Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers, handed out press packets announcing the winners at 3:00 p.m. Monday in the Journalism school’s World Room.

“This is our 92nd year, so we’re old,” Gissler said at the announcement. “We’ve had relatively few finalists leaked this year, so many winners are likely to be truly surprised today.”

There was no winner this year in the Editorial category, which Gissler said represented a lack of majority vote rather than a decreased quality in editorial writing.

“I don’t discuss the board’s decisions, and I can say that the entries had merit,” Gissler said.

Additionally, Bob Dylan will receive a rare Special Citation in Music. There have only been 38 such citations since 1917, and Dylan joins the ranks of distinguished past recipients such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. Last year, John Coltrane received the citation posthumously.

“With Dylan we are recognizing a body of work,” Gissler said. “The Citation also reflects the effort of the Board over the last four years to broaden the scope of the music prize.”

The Washington Post was recognized for its Breaking News Reporting, International Reporting, Feature Writing, and Commentary. It was also awarded with a Pulitzer in Public Service for its work exposing the mistreatment of wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The Breaking News prize, given for the Washington Post’s online breaking coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, marked what Gissler saw as a turning point in Pulitzer history, as this is only the second year the Board has considered online entries for all categories, excluding Still Photography.

Another notable aspect of the 2008 Pulitzers was that there were two winners in both the Investigative Journalism and Poetry categories. This was the first time the Board gave two awards in poetry.

Two prizes were also awarded for Investigative Reporting, which Gissler called “heartening examples” of “high-quality journalism.” The New York Times was recognized for its reporting on toxic impurities in medicine and other products imported from China, while the Chicago Tribune was awarded for its “exposure of faulty governmental regulation of toys, car seats, and cribs, resulting in the extensive recall of hazardous products.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s David Umhoefer won the award in local reporting for stories on “the skirting of tax laws to pad pensions of county employees, prompting change and possible prosecution of key figures,” according to the Pulitzer release.

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney was recognized with a Criticism award for his articles about the visual arts.

Adrees Latif’s photograph depicting last fall’s violence in Burma earned news wire service Reuters the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, and the Concord Monitor’s Preston Gannaway won the Feature Photography Award.

Outside of journalism, Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao took the Pulitzer for Fiction, and Tracy Letts’ play August: Osage County won for Drama.

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