The Washington Post was recognized with two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including a win in the breaking-news category for coverage of the July 13 attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally.
Ann Telnaes, until recently a political cartoonist for The Post’s Opinions page, was awarded the prize for illustrated reporting and commentary. It was her second win in the category, which was labeled “editorial cartooning” when she was first honored in 2001 while working for Tribune Media Services.
ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization, won the public service prize, the Pulitzer’s highest honor, for reporting about the deaths of pregnant people in states where strict but murky abortion laws caused doctors to delay care.
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Considered the top annual awards in journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes are administered by Columbia University’s journalism school and have been doled out to recognize exceptional work since 1917.
The New York Times won four prizes, the most of any news organization this year, in the categories of explanatory reporting, international reporting and breaking-news photography — as well as in the local-news category, sharing the honor with the Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit news organization that began publishing in 2022. The Times and the Banner collaborated on a series about Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis.
The New Yorker won three awards in the feature photography, criticism and audio reporting categories. The Wall Street Journal won the prize for national reporting for coverage of Elon Musk, while Reuters won for investigative reporting for an exposé on lax regulation of fentanyl in the United States. The award for editorial writing went to Raj Mankad, Sharon Steinmann, Lisa Falkenberg and Leah Binkovitz of the Houston Chronicle for a series on dangerous train crossings. Additionally, Esquire contributor Mark Warren won the award for feature writing for covering the suicide of a small-town mayor and Baptist pastor.
The Pulitzer committee also gave out a special citation posthumously to Chuck Stone for “pioneering” work as the first Black columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News, whose writing was later syndicated to nearly 100 publications. Stone, who died in 2014, also co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975.
The Post was also named a finalist in three other categories: national reporting, for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s devastation last fall; international reporting, for coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and the devastation of Gaza; and commentary, for Jerry Brewer’s columns about political issues in sports.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, called the Pulitzer recognition of the Trump shooting stories “a really great win because it touched so many parts of the newsroom.” Murray joined The Post in June — about a month before the attempt on the then-candidate’s life in rural Butler County, north of Pittsburgh — and said he was impressed to see how so many journalists from across the staff jumped at the opportunity to help cover the story.
“Our two folks on the scene, Isaac [Arnsdorf] and Jabin [Botsford] — like all the correspondents, the Secret Service agents and others on the scene — were there at a very dangerous moment and showed great bravery to keep doing their jobs, which they did in an intense and breaking situation,” Murray said.
Arnsdorf described it as a team effort drawing upon the best of the staff’s many skills.
“This really speaks to the value of having professional journalists on the scene in a situation like this,” Arnsdorf said. “So you have dispassionate, trained, neutral observers in a situation where there’s a lot of confusion, and a lot of the information that comes out online often turns out not to be true.”
Botsford, the staff photographer at the rally, put his circumstance starkly. “No one chooses to live through an event like this, but I am grateful I was able to contribute to The Washington Post’s coverage,” he said. “I was able to document what I did that day because of a decade of practice and preparation made possible by my team and role here at The Post. It’s an honor to have a front-row seat to history, and to have an organization that values and encourages visual journalism.”
Telnaes’s work is known for sharp political commentary, particularly those lampooning Trump and other national Republicans. Her win comes months after a high-profile exit from The Post.
The illustrator resigned in early January after a top editor rejected one of her cartoons — a depiction of Post owner Jeff Bezos, along with other business moguls, bowing before a statue of Trump, offering up bags of money. (Bezos is the owner of The Post and the founder of Amazon, which donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund.) Telnaes had previously taken aim at Bezos in October, days after he halted the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president: a stark rectangular image of broad black brushstrokes, which she titled, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — The Post’s slogan since 2017.
In a statement to the Times after Telnaes’s resignation, The Post’s then-editorial page editor, David Shipley, thanked Telnaes for her service but rejected her suggestion that the move was made to stifle criticism of The Post’s owner. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication,” he wrote. “The only bias was against repetition.” (Shipley himself resigned in February following an announcement from Bezos that the Opinions section should be focused on “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish any views that oppose those principles.)
While Telnaes was technically honored for her work in the 2024 calendar year, the prize committee citation also alluded to her unpublished January cartoon, hailing her for “delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity — and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
In a statement, Telnaes said she was honored.
“In a time when the free press is under attack by autocrats in their quest to silence dissent, editorial cartoons and satire are essential for a democracy to survive and thrive,” she wrote. “I’m honored to receive this award and encourage everyone to support their local cartoonist.”
“The Post Opinions had a happy working relationship with Ann Telnaes for nearly 20 years,” said Mary Duenwald, interim opinion editor at The Post. “That she won her second Pulitzer speaks to her talent as a cartoonist.”
Douglas Jehl, the international editor, praised his staff for “merging tenacious traditional reporting with advanced forensic techniques” in covering Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
“While Israel has imposed extraordinary limits on journalists’ physical access to Gaza, The Post’s harnessing of interviews and video, photos and satellite imagery represents a novel new way to bear witness, in part by harvesting vast quantities of data in ways that would not have been imaginable even a decade ago,” Jehl said.
Having led coverage of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, Jehl said he cannot recall a military conflict in which journalists have had as little access as they do in Gaza. “These stories by The Post have shown how technology can be a force maximizer even when journalists must report from outside war zones to hold combatants to account and reveal what governments and other actors seek to keep secret,” he added.
Zachary Goldfarb, the former climate and environment editor recently tapped to lead The Post’s Futures initiative, said that The Post showed deep dedication to covering the human toll of Hurricane Helene. “Our reporters showed true courage in bringing national attention to hard-hit communities,” he said. “We followed that up with visual journalism that explained the forces that drove the storm and stayed with the story for months to capture the difficult recovery.”
Goldfarb said the team used traditional on-the-ground reporting as well as data science and cutting-edge visual storytelling techniques to “capture the human and ecological impact, show what supercharged the storm and illuminate how trust in the government’s response was severely threatened by misinformation on social media.”
Sports columnist Brewer was recognized as a finalist for a package of stories that included “The grievance games,” an extensive multimedia series about how American sports have become a proxy war for intense political division in the Trump era.
Brewer mulled his idea for a series for about 18 months before pitching it to his editors in 2023. He noted that in the aftermath of the protests following the killing of George Floyd and the lead-up to the 2020 election, there was widespread expectation of a wave of political activism among professional athletes, but it faded quickly, and the sports world instead began to reflect the political polarization seen in the rest of society.
“We only think of how sports are used from the standpoint of whether athletes are speaking out or not, but oftentimes there is a counter movement,” Brewer said. “In this case, you could connect American right-wing grievance politics with sports and some of the messages that were being sent out in conjunction with the uneasy feelings that people have about how sports have changed.”
The Pulitzer committee also awards several prizes for literature and other arts: ‘James’ by Percival Everett wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
