The New York Daily News and ProPublica are the twin recipients of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service.
The pairing of a famed local newspaper and an ambitious nonprofit news web site might strike some people as symbolic of turbulent times in journalism.
The Pulitzers, administered by Columbia University, are the most prestigious prizes in American journalism for newspaper and digital news coverage. Winners and finalists were announced on Monday.
The public service prize recognized the Daily News and ProPublica for partnering to expose how the New York Police Department abused eviction rules.
ProPublica is just nine years old but has won four Pulitzers, partly through its innovative collaborations with other news organizations.
Other winners on Monday included the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald, in the explanatory reporting category, for coverage of the Panama Papers; the East Bay Times for breaking news; and the Charleston Gazette-Mail for investigative reporting.
The Pulitzers recognize work from the 2016 calendar year, which means some of the entries involved election-related topics.
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold won the national reporting prize for investigating Donald Trump’s track record of charitable giving.
“David never took things at face value. He checked out everything with amazing persistence,” Post editor Marty Baron said in a statement. “And he went about his work in an innovative, highly resourceful manner — soliciting the assistance of the public via Twitter. In that way, he reimagined how investigative reporting can be carried out while also providing a level of transparency into his work that fascinated the public.”
After the election, Fahrenthold became a CNN contributor on top of his Post reporting.
Short summaries accompanied each winning entry. Only one of the prize summaries — for Fahrenthold’s reporting — mentioned President Trump by name.
But some of the other prizes recognized work that reckoned with the consequences of the campaign and tried to lend insight to the election and its aftermath.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan received the commentary prize for, the judges said, “rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”
The staff of The New York Times shared the international reporting prize for what the judges called “agenda-setting reporting on Vladimir Putin’s efforts to project Russia’s power abroad.”