The Herald Courier of Bristol, Va., a small paper in the coalfields of Appalachia, beat out journalism's powerhouses to win the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for uncovering a scandal in which Virginia landowners were deprived of millions in natural gas royalties.
The daily was honored for what many regard as an endangered form of journalism in this age of wrenching newspaper cutbacks -- aggressive reporting on local issues.
The Washington Post received four Pulitzers -- for international reporting on Iraq, feature writing, commentary and criticism. The New York Times won three -- for national reporting, for explanatory reporting, and for investigative reporting for collaborating with the fledgling news service ProPublica for a story on the life-and-death decisions made by New Orleans doctors during Hurricane Katrina.
The ProPublica prize -- and an editorial cartooning award for the self-syndicated Mark Fiore, whose work appears on the San Francisco Chronicle website SFGate.com -- represented a victory for new media in a competition long dominated by ink-on-newsprint.
ProPublica, a 2-year-old organization, is bankrolled by charitable foundations, staffed by distinguished veteran journalists, and devoted to doing the kind of big investigative journalism projects many newspapers have found too expensive.
Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, said collaborations of the new and the old could become more common.
"The mythical body of journalists has been so decimated we are going to see all kinds of creative ways to get more juice," Clark said. "What's interesting about it is it's a way of building a bridge between the old school and new school."
The Pulitzers are the most prestigious awards in journalism and are given out annually by Columbia University on the recommendation of a board of distinguished journalists and others. Each award carries a $10,000 prize except for the public service award, which is a gold medal.
