The Pulitzer Prizes are two dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the honorific title of associate editor though the Post no longer employs him.
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was an American journalist who served as managing editor and later as executive editor of The Washington Post, from 1965 to 1991. He became a public figure when the Post joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers and gave the go-ahead for the paper's extensive coverage of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. He was also criticized for editorial lapses when the Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it discovered that its award-winning story was false.
The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism. It has been awarded since 1979 for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret "black site" prisons and other controversial features of the government's counter-terrorism campaign." The Washington Post won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the work of reporters Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille "exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials."
The Pulitzer Prizes for 1981 were announced on April 13, 1981.
Thomas M. French is an American writer and journalist.
Walter Haskell Pincus is an American national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.
Michael D. Sallah is an American investigative reporter and non-fiction author who has twice been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Teresa Carpenter is an American author. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for best feature writing.
Mike Sager is an American author, journalist, and educator.
Margot Williams is a journalist and research librarian, who was part of teams at the Washington Post that won two Pulitzer Prizes. In 1998, she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service for reporting on the high rate of police shootings in Washington, D.C. In 2002, she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the war on terror.
Etheleen Renee Shipp is an American journalist and columnist. As a columnist for the New York Daily News, she was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her penetrating columns on race, welfare and other social issues."
Matthew Rosenberg is a Pulitzer-Prize winning American journalist who covers national security issues for The New York Times. He previously spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and was expelled from Afghanistan in August 2014 on the orders of President Hamid Karzai, the first expulsion of a Western journalist from Afghanistan since the Taliban ruled the country.
Sarah Cohen is an American journalist, author, and professor. Cohen is a proponent of, and teaches classes on, computational journalism and authored the book "Numbers in the Newsroom: Using math and statistics in the news."
Sara Elizabeth Ganim is an American journalist and podcast host. She is the current Hearst Journalism Fellow at the University of Florida's Brechner Center for Freedom of Information and the James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment Issues at the Columbia Journalism School. Previously, she was a correspondent for CNN. In 2011 and 2012, she was a reporter for The Patriot-News, a daily newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There she broke the story that featured the Sandusky scandal and the Second Mile charity. For the Sandusky/Penn State coverage, "Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff" won a number of national awards including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, making Ganim the third-youngest winner of a Pulitzer. The award cited "courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Sandusky sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky."
Sabrina Rubin Erdely is an American former journalist and magazine reporter, who in 2014 authored a defamatory article in Rolling Stone describing the alleged rape of a University of Virginia student by several fraternity members. The story, titled "A Rape on Campus", was later discredited. The magazine retracted the article following a Columbia University School of Journalism review which concluded that Erdely and Rolling Stone failed to engage in "basic, even routine journalistic practice". As a result, Erdely was named in three lawsuits with demands of more than $32 million combined for damages resulting from the publication of the story.
Robert Skinner Boyd was an American journalist who spent most of his career working for the Knight Newspaper Group, spending two decades as the group's Washington bureau chief. He and Clark Hoyt won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for uncovering the fact that Senator Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern's choice for vice president, had had severe psychiatric problems and undergone three shock treatments. Instead of publishing their scoop, they disclosed their findings to McGovern's top advisor, and Eagleton withdrew as the Democratic nominee.
Hannah Dreier is an American journalist and staff writer for The New York Times. Previously, she was Venezuela correspondent for The Associated Press during the first four years of Nicolás Maduro's presidency. In 2016, she was kidnapped by the Venezuelan secret police and threatened because of her work. She has also written for ProPublica and The Washington Post.
