THE POST WINS FOUR PULITZERS; BRISTOL, VA., PAPER WINS FOR PUBLIC SERVICE

The Washington Post won four Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for reporting
on subjects ranging from war to modern dance, and the New York Times
won three awards, including one shared with ProPublica, a new
nonprofit organization created to pursue investigative journalism.

The public service medal went to a small Virginia newspaper, the
Bristol Herald Courier, for examining the state's mismanagement of
natural-gas royalties.

Among The Post's winners, Gene Weingarten, who received the feature
writing award for his story on parents who accidentally killed their
children by leaving them in cars, said he came close to doing the
same thing with his daughter 25 years ago. Anthony Shadid won the
international reporting prize for a series on the Iraq war.

Sarah Kaufman, who writes about dance and movement in venues as
wide-ranging as movies and viral videos, took the criticism award.
Kathleen Parker, whose columns are syndicated by the Washington Post
Writers Group, won the Pulitzer for commentary.

David E. Hoffman, a former Washington Post assistant managing editor
for foreign news, won a Pulitzer in the general nonfiction category
for "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and
Its Dangerous Legacy." The board's citation called the book "a well
documented narrative that examines the terrifying doomsday
competition between two superpowers and how weapons of mass
destruction still imperil humankind."

The National Enquirer, which drew attention by entering its expose of
John Edwards fathering a child with a former presidential campaign
aide, was not a finalist. The prizes are administered by Columbia University.

ProPublica, which launched just more than two years ago, employs 35
journalists and has teamed with major newspapers and networks, is the
first independent nonprofit organization to win a Pulitzer. "The
prizes are nice, but what's really nice is that it suggests our
nonprofit, nonpartisan model can work," said founding editor Paul Steiger.

ProPublica's Sheri Fink shared the investigative reporting prize with
the New York Times Magazine for reporting on decisions made by
exhausted doctors whose hospital was cut off by Hurricane Katrina.
The Pulitzer board awarded a second investigative prize to Barbara
Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News for exposing
a rogue police narcotics squad.

Weingarten, whose Pulitzer was his second, called his examination of
child deaths "the hardest story I've ever done. . . . There was
nothing in it for these people to talk to me, except the chance to
save a life." He said that a quarter-century ago he almost left his
toddler in the back seat when he forgot to drop her at day care,
until she spoke as he was leaving the car.

"It's a shame you carry with you forever. . . . My heart kept leaping
into my mouth with recognition of what had almost happened,"
Weingarten said. He said that when he told his daughter Molly, now
28, "I couldn't look her in the eye."

Kaufman, who studied ballet at a Bethesda academy as a young woman,
said her work was first published in college after she called the
Washington City Paper and complained that it ran no dance reviews.
"To the extent I can capture my experience in the theater and bring
the reader there with me, it's a joy to be able to do that," she said.

Part of her job, Kaufman said, is "to say in a beautiful way what's
obvious about an art form." But particularly in dance, she said,
"there's not enough scholarship, there's not enough rigorous
journalism that asks hard questions. . . . I've always viewed myself
as a journalist, as a reporter first."

Parker said that when she left her South Carolina home six years ago
with a U-Haul trailer to rent a studio apartment in Washington,
"nobody had ever heard of me" -- despite the fact that she was widely
syndicated. "There's this idea you don't exist unless you're in
Washington. . . . When you say something on the pages of The
Washington Post, it's just different."

Parker, whose column started appearing regularly on the Post op-ed
page 18 months ago, began her career as a one-woman bureau in
Palatka, Fla., and still commutes to the South Carolina home she
shares with her husband. "Basically, I'm in a bunker, writing what I
think," she said. "I have never tried to please anyone. I have never
thought about what the reader would think, and that's very easy when
you're alone." Her winning columns included pieces on national
politics, abortion and her childhood love of Nancy Drew.

Widely viewed as right-leaning, Parker received 12,000 hostile
e-mails after writing in National Review Online that Sarah Palin was
unqualified to be vice president. But Parker resists the label,
saying, "Sometimes I'm conservative; sometimes I'm not."

Shadid, a former Baghdad bureau chief who also won his second
Pulitzer, spoke from Boston, two days after his wife had a baby. He
returned to Iraq after a two-year absence "to write against the
narrative that the war was over," Shadid said. "There was a sense in
the public that there was an invasion and an occupation, that it
turned out okay, and it was a lot more complicated than that."

What he tried to examine, said Shadid, who joined the New York Times
earlier this year, is "what did America leave behind -- what kind of
society, what kind of government, what kind of landscape?"

Daniel Gilbert, one of the seven reporters at the Bristol paper, near
the Tennessee border, answered the phone when a Post reporter called
the newsroom. "It's a rush, for sure," he said of the prize.

Gilbert said the natural-gas investigation "took 13 months of
reporting incrementally, a little bit every week, every month."

Matt Richtel and the New York Times staff won the national reporting
award for their work on distracted driving caused by cellphones and
other devices. Michael Moss and the Times staff received the
explanatory reporting prize for work on food safety issues.

The local reporting prize went to Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel for stories on fraud and abuse in a child-care
program. The Seattle Times won the breaking-news award for its
coverage, both in print and online, of the shooting deaths of four
police officers and the 40-hour manhunt that followed.

Three Dallas Morning News staff writers -- Tod Robberson, Colleen
McCain Nelson and William McKenzie -- won the Pulitzer for editorial
writing. Mary Chind of the Des Moines Register captured the prize for
breaking news photography for a daring rescue near a broken dam, and
Craig Walker of the Denver Post won for feature photography.

The editorial cartooning prize went to Mark Fiore, who syndicates
himself and appears on the San Francisco Chronicle site, SFGate.com.