The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on abuse in the seafood industry that helped free 2,000 slave labourers, and Reuters and the New York Times shared the brea
The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on abuse in the seafood industry that helped free 2,000 slave labourers, and Reuters and the New York Times shared the breaking news photography award for images of the European refugee crisis.
The Pulitzer Board, in conferring the most prestigious honours in US journalism and the arts on Monday, also honoured the Los Angeles Times for breaking news reporting for its coverage of the massacre by Islamist militants in San Bernardino, California.
This year’s announcement at New York’s Columbia University marked the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzers, which began in 1917 after a bequest from newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.
In the awards for letters, drama and music, the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda won for best drama. The Pulitzer board called the Broadway hit “a landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.” Viet Thanh Nguyen won the fiction award for The Sympathizer, an immigrant story about a “man of two minds” and two countries, Vietnam and the United States. The board awarded the history prize to the T.J. Stiles book, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick, a reporter for the Washington Post, won the non-fiction prize. The book explores the rise of the Islamic State, in part through a detailed portrait of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the group’s founder, who was killed in an American airstrike in 2006.
The AP’s prize-winning “Seafood from Slaves” report was an investigation into the mistreatment of workers in Southeast Asia used to supply seafood to American supermarkets and restaurants. The coverage resulted in the freeing of 2,000 slave labourers and sweeping reforms, the board said. The New York Times, with a record 117 Pulitzer prizes and citations before this year’s announcement, added two more in 2016, taking the prize for international reporting in addition to its photography award. The Boston Globe, the Tampa Bay Times and the New Yorker magazine also won two awards each.
The Reuters photo coverage of Middle-Eastern migrants arriving in Europe was led from Greece by Yannis Behrakis, chief photographer for Greece and Cyprus and the Guardian newspaper’s 2015 Agency Photographer of the Year. The Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune shared the 2016 prize for investigative reporting. The two Florida newspapers won for collaborative reporting on violence and neglect in the state’s mental hospitals.
The Tampa Bay Times took a second Pulitzer, with three of its reporters being honoured for showing the consequences of a school board turning some county schools in to “failure factories.”
The prize for national reporting went to the staff of the Washington Post for developing a database on fatal police shootings and those likely to fall victim. Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times won in the international reporting category for her stories on the inhumane treatment of Afghan women. The Boston Globe’s prizes were in the feature photography and commentary categories, while the New Yorker took prizes for criticism and feature writing.
