S.C. paper claims Pulitzer

Report on domestic violence wins public service award

The Post and Courier staff, including publisher P.J. Browning, cheers after the Pulitzer announcement Monday, April 20, 2015 in Charleston, S.C. The newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its series on domestic violence. The Public Service gold medal went to reporters Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff for the series “Till Death Do Us Part.” The series explored the deaths of 300 women in the past decade and a legal system in which abusers face at most 30 days in jail if convicted of attacking a woman, while cruelty to a dog can bring up to five years in prison.   (Matthew Fortner/The Post And Courier via AP)
The Post and Courier staff, including publisher P.J. Browning, cheers after the Pulitzer announcement Monday, April 20, 2015 in Charleston, S.C. The newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its series on domestic violence. The Public Service gold medal went to reporters Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff for the series “Till Death Do Us Part.” The series explored the deaths of 300 women in the past decade and a legal system in which abusers face at most 30 days in jail if convicted of attacking a woman, while cruelty to a dog can bring up to five years in prison. (Matthew Fortner/The Post And Courier via AP)

NEW YORK -- The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for an examination of the deadly toll of domestic violence. The New York Times collected three awards and the Los Angeles Times won two.

The Seattle Times staff took the breaking news award for its coverage of a mudslide that killed 43 people and its exploration of whether the disaster could have been prevented.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both won investigative reporting prizes, the Times for an examination of lobbyists' influence on state attorneys general, and the Journal for detailing fraud and waste in the Medicare payment system.

The New York Times' coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa won Pulitzers for international reporting and feature photography, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was honored in the breaking news photography category for its images of the racial unrest touched off by the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

The Washington Post took the national reporting prize for exposing security lapses that spurred an overhaul of the Secret Service.

The Pulitzer judges also recognized less widely known stories, such as The Post and Courier's exploration of 300 women's deaths in the past decade. The newspaper shed light on a legal system in which first-time offenders face at most 30 days in jail for a domestic violence beating but can get five years in prison for cruelty to a dog.

"We felt so passionate about this project, and we felt so passionate about the difference it could bring to South Carolina," said P.J. Browning, publisher of the 84,200-circulation Post and Courier, which last won a Pulitzer in 1925 for editorial writing.

Since the series was published, state lawmakers have proposed tougher penalties for domestic violence, and Gov. Nikki Haley has created a task force to investigate the problem.

The prizes spanned news outlets large and small: The 70,000-circulation Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., won the local reporting award for exposing corruption in a school district. Bloomberg News was a first-time winner, taking the explanatory reporting award for an examination of corporate tax dodging.

The Los Angeles Times' prizes were for feature writing that put a human face on California's drought and for Mary McNamara's television criticism.

The Seattle Times newsroom broke into cheers after its mudslide coverage was honored.

"We did what any good newsroom should do when a big story breaks," editor Kathy Best told staff members. "We gave people accurate information when rumors and inaccuracies were swirling all over the place. We asked hard questions in the moment. When public officials were saying, 'Oh, this was unforeseen,' we showed that it was not unforeseen."

The commentary prize went to the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg, who examined the case of a man wrongfully convicted of killing a police officer, among other problems in the legal and immigration systems. Kathleen Kingsbury of The Boston Globe was recognized for editorial writing; she looked at restaurant workers' low wages and examined the toll of income inequality.

Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News won the editorial cartooning prize for his look at such issues as immigration, gun control and problems in the Veterans Affairs hospital system.

The Pulitzers, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer and first given out in 1917, are American journalism's highest honor.

For the first time, many online and print magazines were eligible for the journalism awards -- in feature writing and investigative reporting only -- but none of them won.

While the winners were largely drawn from old-media names, "the digital component of their work is becoming more and more sophisticated," prize administrator Mike Pride said. "Newspapers know where the future is and, in some cases, are doing really good jobs at it."

Information for this article was contributed by Deepti Hajela, Jake Pearson, Bruce Smith, Chris Grygiel and Philip Marcelo of The Associated Press.

A Section on 04/21/2015

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