Reuters, New York Times Win Pulitzers for Coverage of Racial Injustice, COVID-19

Reuters and the Minneapolis Star Tribune each won a Pulitzer Prize on Friday for journalism about racial inequities in U.S. policing, while the New York Times and the Atlantic were honored for chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic, the two topics that dominated last year's headlines.

The Star Tribune won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for what the board called its "urgent, authoritative and nuanced" coverage of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police last May, while Reuters and the Atlantic shared the award for explanatory reporting.

The Pulitzer Prizes are the most prestigious awards in American journalism and have been handed out since 1917, when newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer established them in a bequest to New York's Columbia University in his will.

In 2020, "the nation's news organizations faced the complexity of sequentially covering a global pandemic, a racial reckoning, and a bitterly contested presidential election," Mindy Marques, co-chair of the Pulitzer Board, said at the announcement ceremony, which was broadcast online.

Source: Reuters