Pubdate: Tue, 13 Apr 2010
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A01, Front Page
Copyright: 2010 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Howard Kurtz
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/author/Kathleen+Parker

THE POST WINS FOUR PULITZERS; BRISTOL, VA., PAPER WINS FOR PUBLIC SERVICE

The Washington Post won four Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for reporting 
on subjects ranging from war to modern dance, and the New York Times 
won three awards, including one shared with ProPublica, a new 
nonprofit organization created to pursue investigative journalism.

The public service medal went to a small Virginia newspaper, the 
Bristol Herald Courier, for examining the state's mismanagement of 
natural-gas royalties.

Among The Post's winners, Gene Weingarten, who received the feature 
writing award for his story on parents who accidentally killed their 
children by leaving them in cars, said he came close to doing the 
same thing with his daughter 25 years ago. Anthony Shadid won the 
international reporting prize for a series on the Iraq war.

Sarah Kaufman, who writes about dance and movement in venues as 
wide-ranging as movies and viral videos, took the criticism award. 
Kathleen Parker, whose columns are syndicated by the Washington Post 
Writers Group, won the Pulitzer for commentary.

David E. Hoffman, a former Washington Post assistant managing editor 
for foreign news, won a Pulitzer in the general nonfiction category 
for "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and 
Its Dangerous Legacy." The board's citation called the book "a well 
documented narrative that examines the terrifying doomsday 
competition between two superpowers and how weapons of mass 
destruction still imperil humankind."

The National Enquirer, which drew attention by entering its expose of 
John Edwards fathering a child with a former presidential campaign 
aide, was not a finalist. The prizes are administered by Columbia University.

ProPublica, which launched just more than two years ago, employs 35 
journalists and has teamed with major newspapers and networks, is the 
first independent nonprofit organization to win a Pulitzer. "The 
prizes are nice, but what's really nice is that it suggests our 
nonprofit, nonpartisan model can work," said founding editor Paul Steiger.

ProPublica's Sheri Fink shared the investigative reporting prize with 
the New York Times Magazine for reporting on decisions made by 
exhausted doctors whose hospital was cut off by Hurricane Katrina. 
The Pulitzer board awarded a second investigative prize to Barbara 
Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News for exposing 
a rogue police narcotics squad.

Weingarten, whose Pulitzer was his second, called his examination of 
child deaths "the hardest story I've ever done. . . . There was 
nothing in it for these people to talk to me, except the chance to 
save a life." He said that a quarter-century ago he almost left his 
toddler in the back seat when he forgot to drop her at day care, 
until she spoke as he was leaving the car.

"It's a shame you carry with you forever. . . . My heart kept leaping 
into my mouth with recognition of what had almost happened," 
Weingarten said. He said that when he told his daughter Molly, now 
28, "I couldn't look her in the eye."

Kaufman, who studied ballet at a Bethesda academy as a young woman, 
said her work was first published in college after she called the 
Washington City Paper and complained that it ran no dance reviews. 
"To the extent I can capture my experience in the theater and bring 
the reader there with me, it's a joy to be able to do that," she said.

Part of her job, Kaufman said, is "to say in a beautiful way what's 
obvious about an art form." But particularly in dance, she said, 
"there's not enough scholarship, there's not enough rigorous 
journalism that asks hard questions. . . . I've always viewed myself 
as a journalist, as a reporter first."

Parker said that when she left her South Carolina home six years ago 
with a U-Haul trailer to rent a studio apartment in Washington, 
"nobody had ever heard of me" -- despite the fact that she was widely 
syndicated. "There's this idea you don't exist unless you're in 
Washington. . . . When you say something on the pages of The 
Washington Post, it's just different."

Parker, whose column started appearing regularly on the Post op-ed 
page 18 months ago, began her career as a one-woman bureau in 
Palatka, Fla., and still commutes to the South Carolina home she 
shares with her husband. "Basically, I'm in a bunker, writing what I 
think," she said. "I have never tried to please anyone. I have never 
thought about what the reader would think, and that's very easy when 
you're alone." Her winning columns included pieces on national 
politics, abortion and her childhood love of Nancy Drew.

Widely viewed as right-leaning, Parker received 12,000 hostile 
e-mails after writing in National Review Online that Sarah Palin was 
unqualified to be vice president. But Parker resists the label, 
saying, "Sometimes I'm conservative; sometimes I'm not."

Shadid, a former Baghdad bureau chief who also won his second 
Pulitzer, spoke from Boston, two days after his wife had a baby. He 
returned to Iraq after a two-year absence "to write against the 
narrative that the war was over," Shadid said. "There was a sense in 
the public that there was an invasion and an occupation, that it 
turned out okay, and it was a lot more complicated than that."

What he tried to examine, said Shadid, who joined the New York Times 
earlier this year, is "what did America leave behind -- what kind of 
society, what kind of government, what kind of landscape?"

Daniel Gilbert, one of the seven reporters at the Bristol paper, near 
the Tennessee border, answered the phone when a Post reporter called 
the newsroom. "It's a rush, for sure," he said of the prize.

Gilbert said the natural-gas investigation "took 13 months of 
reporting incrementally, a little bit every week, every month."

Matt Richtel and the New York Times staff won the national reporting 
award for their work on distracted driving caused by cellphones and 
other devices. Michael Moss and the Times staff received the 
explanatory reporting prize for work on food safety issues.

The local reporting prize went to Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee 
Journal Sentinel for stories on fraud and abuse in a child-care 
program. The Seattle Times won the breaking-news award for its 
coverage, both in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four 
police officers and the 40-hour manhunt that followed.

Three Dallas Morning News staff writers -- Tod Robberson, Colleen 
McCain Nelson and William McKenzie -- won the Pulitzer for editorial 
writing. Mary Chind of the Des Moines Register captured the prize for 
breaking news photography for a daring rescue near a broken dam, and 
Craig Walker of the Denver Post won for feature photography.

The editorial cartooning prize went to Mark Fiore, who syndicates 
himself and appears on the San Francisco Chronicle site, SFGate.com. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake