2012 Pulitzers: Two Online Winners

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners [1] released Monday contained a couple of surprises. Two online news outlets, The Huffington Post and Politico, won their first Pulitzers, while in two other categories, no awards were given.

The prize board gave no prize for Editorial Writing for the first time in four years and for the first time in 35 years gave no Fiction prize. But Sig Gissler, the administrator of the prizes, said the lack of awards in those categories doesn’t suggest anything about the quality of the entries.

“This is not a message,” he said. “It’s a situation. The problem is that ultimately, none of the nominees was able to get a majority vote.”

Since the Pulitzers were created in 1917, the jurors have failed to give awards 62 times. This is the ninth time no award has been given in Editorial Writing and the 11th time that no Fiction prize was given.

The Huffington Post won a Pulitzer for National Reporting [2] by veteran war reporter David Wood, while Politico’s Matt Wuerker won for Editorial Cartooning [3]. Two went to The New York Times [4], for Explanatory Reporting by David Kocieniewski and International Reporting by Jeffrey Gettleman.