Appendix A: Journalism Awards and Prizes - The Pulitzer Prizes

Based on an endowment to Columbia University given by New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer early in the twentieth century, these prizes, first awarded in 1917, hold unique status as the most prestigious awards in journalism. They are not open to printed magazines or broadcast media or their respective websites. (Pulitzer Prizes are also awarded in numerous other categories not detailed here, such as music, drama, poetry, and for books of biography, history, fiction, and nonfiction.) Most of the prize categories carry a $10,000 award. The coveted public service award earns the winning newspaper a gold medal.

In 2009, Internet-only writing was first recognized across all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories. Online-only content had been initially allowed starting in 2006, but only for the breaking news and breaking-news photography categories. The broadening of online prize acceptability is surely another indicator of the growing importance of online journalism generally.

The New York Times and its staff have won more Pulitzers than any other paper—101 by 2009. Sadly, a number of the traditional newspapers found on these prize lists are no more (in considerable part because of competition from that same online source), having succumbed during the economic collapse of newspapers late in the twenty-first century's first decade. Many others are in a perilous state and may not survive.

As with any prize, the Pulitzers have raised controversy from time to time. Perhaps the best known concerned a prize category not included here, though it did concern journalism. W. A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst (Scribner 1961) was nominated for the biography award, but—later news reports indicated—the evaluation team for the award could not see clear to giving their prize to a study, no matter how good, of Joseph Pulitzer's chief rival. The story reverberated for weeks.

This appendix lists the most recent three decades of the prizes. The Pulitzers have been arranged into four categories—the important public service prize (given to a publication rather than individuals), the many reporting awards, prizes for comment and criticism, and the prizes given for photography and editorial cartoons. Over the years, the number and categories of the Prizes have changed (and slowly increased). Where possible, the listings below show how former categories relate to current ones. For prizes currently given out annually, we include the words describing what the honor is designed to recognize. We also provide the gist of the award citation for awards since 1980 (since 1960 for the public service prize) to offer a sense of just what sort of writing, photography, or cartooning is being honored. And we provide the online source for older (pre-1980) award information. The Pulitzer website offers more details (and often the actual winning story, photos, or cartoons), and the runner-ups for the prizes given since 1995.