NEW YORK (AP) — The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for scrutinizing the Trump administration’s sweeping, choppy cuts and changes to federal agencies, and The Associated Press won the award Monday for international reporting about surveillance.
In a year when several prize-winning projects zoomed in on the Trump presidency, the Post's coverage illuminated the fast-moving, sometimes opaque particulars of the administration's drive to reshape the national government, and judges credited the Post with detailing what the changes meant for individual Americans.
The Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown was given a special citation for her reporting, nearly a decade ago, that drew attention to Jeffrey Epstein ’s abuses. The New York Times won three of the coveted prizes, the Post and Reuters each won two, and smaller outlets ranging from The Connecticut Mirror to the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” also were recognized in a challenging year for American journalism.
“This is always a day of celebration in our communities, but perhaps never more so than today as we face tremendous political and economic pressures,” prize administrator Marjorie Miller said in a livestream announcing the awards.
In the last few months, the Post cut a third of its staff, CBS News announced it would shutter its nearly century-old radio service, The AP offered buyouts to over 120 journalists and some regional newspapers also publicly struggled. CBS parent Paramount’s acquisition of CNN has raised questions about what’s next for those networks. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump continued to bash, and sometimes sue, outlets whose coverage he finds objectionable.
Spanning three years, thousands of pages of documents and numerous interviews, the AP project found that American companies help lay the foundations of the Chinese government’s system for monitoring and policing its citizens.
“This was sweeping and deeply impactful reporting, the kind of work that highlights the unique strengths of AP’s global, multiformat newsroom,” executive editor Julie Pace said in an email to staffers. She is among the Pulitzer Board's new members.
The prizes covered President Donald Trump's first year back in the White House, and two winning entries focused on his pulverizing approach to norms and constraints. The Times took the investigative reporting prize for exploring Trump's boundary-pushing approach to the notion of conflicts of interest. Reuters, which won for national reporting, looked at how Trump has used the federal government and his supporters’ influence to expand presidential authority and to try to punish his foes, the award judges noted.
Reuters' reporting on the social media giant Meta won a prize in the newly revived category for beat reporting, a term for journalists consistently assigned to a particular topic. The board brought that honor back for the first time in two decades.
Reuters' wins spotlighted "fearless, deeply reported, original work that holds powerful institutions to account,” editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni said in a statement.
The prize for breaking news went to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s coverage of last year’s mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school, where two children were killed and more than a dozen others were injured during the school’s first Mass of the academic year. Judges praised the thoroughness and compassion of the newspaper’s reporting on a scene of carnage in its hometown,
“To me, it’s really a moment to appreciate the power of local journalism,” Kathleen Hennessey, the Star Tribune's editor and senior vice president, said in an interview. One Tribune reporter who lives in the neighborhood heard the gunshots and called 911 before running over to the scene, she noted; an editor at the paper has children who attend the school.
“It feels really gratifying to be recognized, but for this newsroom, this is also just still a really painful event,” Hennessey said.
The San Francisco Chronicle received the award for explanatory reporting, which means work that makes a complex topic comprehensible to everyday readers and viewers. The Chronicle's series laid out how insurers, aided by algorithmic tools, undervalued and denied rebuilding claims for fire-destroyed homes, the judges said.
In visual journalism, The Times got a breaking news photography award for depicting devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from Israel's war in the territory. The Post won the feature photography prize, for a visual essay on a family welcoming a firstborn as the child’s father grappled with terminal cancer. The award for illustrated reporting and commentary — a category that includes editorial cartoons and more — went to Bloomberg for a graphic novel about online scams that threaten “digital arrest.”
While several prizes reflected the year’s biggest news stories, others highlighted work that wasn’t pushed to everyone’s phones.
One of two local reporting awards, for example, went to The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica for a series on how towing companies profited off Connecticut laws, at the expense of poor car owners; the state soon changed the laws. The Chicago Tribune also was honored for its coverage of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Windy City.
Texas Monthly won the feature writing award for an editor's first-person story of flooding that killed his toddler nephew and swept his home away. Also in Texas, The Dallas Morning News' architecture critic won the criticism award; judges praised Mark Lamster's wit and expertise. The New York Times' M. Gessen won the opinion writing award for essays on authoritarianism.
The audio award went to “Pablo Torre Finds Out” for an investigation of Los Angeles Clippers superstar Kawhi Leonard’s financial arrangements with a environmental startup in which the team owner invested. The judges called the project a “pioneering and entertaining form of live podcast journalism.”
The Pulitzer announcement — usually followed by a dinner later in the year — came little more than a week after an armed man rushed a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with Secret Service agents outside another big event for U.S. journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. The man is now charged with trying to assassinate Trump, who was attending the event for his first time as president.
The Pulitzer journalism awards are for work done in 2025 by U.S. news sites, newspapers, magazines and wire services in text, photo, and audio. Video and graphics can be part of an entry package. Television and radio stations’ websites also are eligible, if their entries focus on written material.
Separately, Monday’s awards also honored books, music and theater.
The Pulitzer Prizes were established in newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer’s will and were first awarded in 1917. Winners receive $15,000, and the prestigious public service award earns a gold medal. Decisions are made by the Pulitzer Board, based at Columbia University in New York.
Associated Press writer Sarah Raza contributed from Canton, Michigan.
FILE - Signage for The Pulitzer Prizes appear at Columbia University, May 28, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
