The announcement of the world’s most important journalism awards began with the depressing observation that more than 130 newspapers in American journalism closed last year and 3,000 jobs were lost. In addition, around 4,000 books are at risk of censorship, said the very serious Pulitzer official Marjorie Miller when she announced the winners live and alone on Monday afternoon in the unadorned streaming.
There are plenty of difficult topics in these unpleasant times, one of which is currently putting Columbia University in a state of emergency. There have been demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza on this campus for days, and because the New York campus also houses the headquarters of the Pulitzer Prize, the Pulitzer Committee issued a statement a few days before the virtual ceremony: In it, the committee praised those reporters of the student body reporting on the protests “at great personal and academic risk.”
:Escalation on campus
Student protests at universities are intensifying. In New York, police stormed an occupied building on the 56th anniversary of an eviction that went down in history.
There was no official award for this; as usual, Monday afternoon was about publications by professionals. They also had a lot to do with the horror in the Middle East. The New York Times was honored, among other things, for her reporting on the Hamas terror in Israel on October 7, 2023, the failure of the Israeli intelligence service and, as the citation states, the “wide-ranging, deadly response of the Israeli military.” Reuters won in the “Breaking News Photography” category for its images of the same horror.
:Impressive Pietà
A Palestinian woman mourns the loss of her niece: The choice of World Press Photo is strong, but the reasoning is irritating.
Also representatives of smaller media and portals like ProPublica and Lookout Santa Cruz This time they are among the chosen ones for the world-famous trophy. Always reliable for exceptional texts The New Yorker presents two of the new Pulitzer Prize winners, who also include the authors of important books such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Jonathan Egg and Ilyon Woo. Her works deal with the Civil War, slavery, Martin Luther King. The names of the two most famous newspapers in America were mentioned in three journalism Pulitzer titles.
Hannah Dreier from the Investigative category won New York Times, which in a series described the devastating extent of the work of migrant children in the USA. The paper’s Katie Engelhart was honored as the best feature; she wrote about a family’s legal and emotional struggle as her mother’s dementia progressed.
The Washington Post won the top prize in national reporting for her study of the AR-15 rapid-fire rifle, which gunmen use to shoot scores of people in schools and shopping centers. The paper shares this victory with the agency Reuters, which took a closer look at Elon Musk’s businesses. And now, in addition to Post editorial writer David E. Hoffman, he is too post-Columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza has ascended to the Pulitzer Olympus, but at a high price. His courageous contributions are made in a Russian prison cell.
The Russian-British activist and regime opponent was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2023. He warns “of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and calls for a democratic future for his country,” praised the Pulitzer jurors. The author is currently in a prison colony in Omsk. In keeping with this, the Pulitzer people who tuned in recalled increasing repression worldwide and the reporter Evan Gershkovich from Wall Street Journal, which Putin’s regime has been holding for more than a year. The Pulitzer Association demands his immediate release: “Free him now.”