Washington Post wins 6 Pulitzers

NEW YORK – The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes on Monday – the most in its history – including awards for its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and a series exposing shoddy treatment of America’s war-wounded at Walter Reed hospital.

The New York Times received two Pulitzers: one for investigative reporting, for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products from China, and one for explanatory reporting, for examining the ethical issues surrounding DNA testing.

Previously, the Post won as many as four Pulitzers in a single year, in 2006. The record is seven, won by the Times in 2002, mostly for its coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheers erupted in the Post newsroom when the prizes were announced. Like many newspapers, the Post is struggling mightily with falling circulation and advertising revenue. It is going through its third round of employee buyouts since 2003.

“This is actually a boost to remind people that we can produce this kind of journalism at any time,” said Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. “We’re going to have a large enough newsroom to continue to produce this kind of quality journalism.”

Post reporter Dana Priest said the Walter Reed story was among the work in which she took the most pride. She and Hull worked on the story for about six months, developing sources among soldiers and their families.

“It’s a reminder of what basic journalism can get you involved in,” she said. “At a time when journalism is under this cloud of financial uncertainty, reporters have to stay focused, and if we don’t, we sort of doom people like the Army specialist who lived with the cockroaches in Building 18.

“We can do better than that.”

In the arts categories, thanks to Bob Dylan, rock ‘n’ roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize, cited for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.