Post Grabs Six Pulitzers
Don may be nigh on relentless with his critique of the Washington Post, but they certainly do get things right from time to time, and today they take home six Pulitzer awards for National Reporting (to Jo Becker and Barton Gellman for their exploration of Vice President Cheney), International Reporting (to Steve Fainaru for his coverage of private security firms in Iraq), Feature Writing (to Gene Weingarten for his piece on Joshua Bell busking in the Metro), Commentary (to Steven Pearlstein for his columns on economic ills in the US), Public Service (Dana Priest, Anne Hull and Michel du Cille for their coverage of Walter Reed) and Breaking News Reporting (for reporting on Virginia Tech)
Wow. When you look at those six awards, it’s hard to see how anyone else could have come home with the award. The Cheney piece, the Walter Reed piece and the Gene Weingarten piece on Joshua Bell were all heavily featured and reprinted throughout the rest of the US, and the Post’s unique work on the VT shootings was pretty much incredible.
Congrats, Post, for your excellent work in 2007. You guys are giving the winners all big raises, right? Right?
The last time one paper swept up so many of the awards in one year was 2002, when the New York Times picked up 7 awards, most of them for coverage of 9-11 and the aftermath. I’m sure their news department will find appropriate other parallels in the history of the award, but going back twenty years, I can find no other paper with as distinguished a record in a single year as the Post has in the 2008 awards.
[Update] The Post has put all the award-winning articles together for easy reading.
You’ll never hear me say boo against Mr Weingarten taking an award, regardless of what it is. When I moved up here I was delighted to see his name in the Post Magazine. One of the worst decisions the Miami Herald ever made was to stop printing Tropic and Gene was one of the people who made that magic happen. Being able to open up the Washington Post magazine and see his name there every Sunday is, to me, a gift.
Albeit one I have to pay $30 a quarter to receive, but a gift never the less.
It’s definitely been an impressive year at the Post. They remain the gold standard for U.S. politics and for liberal opinion, and it’s always a delight to read Michael Gerson et al.
I was most impressed by the coverage of Walter Reed. It was rigorous and comprehensive without being callous. Not once was opinion interjected to force the readers’ mind into feeling one way or another. Emotive on its own, the stories demonstrated the true power of great journalism.
Awards well deserved. BTW, the Times got 2 Pulitzers.
What I really admire most about the Post these days is that, at a time when newspapers are spending a lot of time worrying about how to stay competitive in the face of 24 hour news channels, newsbloggers, etc who might be able to jump on a story faster and spread it, they’ve figured out that what they have that the others don’t is a big ol’ news budget to throw at original, investigative reporting. Maybe a group of bloggers could have come up with the Walter Reed story, but they would have been constrained by day jobs, lack of budget, the pressure to turn a story out rapidly, etc. So the Post has figured out what they can do better than other media sources, and they’ve run with it. Good for them; the Pulitzers were well-deserved.