New York Times Wins Four 2024 Pulitzer Prizes \ Newslooks \ Washington DC \ Mary Sidiqi \ Evening Edition \ The New York Times and The New Yorker led the 2024 Pulitzer Prize honors, winning a combined seven awards. ProPublica earned the prestigious public service medal for reporting on maternal deaths in states with abortion restrictions. Coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, Gaza, and the fentanyl crisis were also prominently recognized.
Quick Looks
- New York Times earned four Pulitzers, including for work on fentanyl, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
- The New Yorker received three awards, including for its Gaza commentary and investigative podcast.
- ProPublica won the Public Service Gold Medal for the second consecutive year.
- The Washington Post was honored for breaking news coverage of the Trump assassination attempt.
- Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes was recognized after resigning from the Post over a censorship dispute.
- Awards were given across 15 journalism and 8 arts categories, including theater and music.
- Notable winning topics included abortion policy, military violence, and foreign conflicts.
- The NYT and The Baltimore Banner shared a local reporting prize for exposing Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis.
- Photojournalist Doug Mills of the NYT won for dramatic images from the Trump shooting.
- Moises Saman of The New Yorker was honored for his haunting photos from Syria’s Sednaya prison.
Deep Look
The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were more than just accolades—they were a powerful reminder of journalism’s evolving role in a world where truth is increasingly contested, power is concentrated in fewer hands, and crises are no longer isolated but intertwined across borders. From Baltimore to Gaza, Kabul to Congress, this year’s winners captured not just headlines but human consequences, laying bare the urgent role of investigative, explanatory, and narrative reporting.
New York Times: Documenting a Fractured World with Precision
With four Pulitzer Prizes, The New York Times cemented its status not just as a newspaper of record but as a newsroom evolving to meet a rapidly shifting world.
- Azam Ahmed, Christina Goldbaum, and Matthieu Aikins’s Explanatory Reporting on U.S. failures in Afghanistan drew a throughline from decades of policy missteps to the collapse of one of America’s longest wars. It wasn’t just a story of failure—it was a mirror held up to the United States’ struggle to learn from history.
- Doug Mills’s images of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump brought photojournalism back to the center of civic engagement. His work didn’t just capture a moment of violence—it revealed a nation in freefall, politically divided and vulnerable.
- In Sudan, The Times’s international reporting team exposed a forgotten war in real time. While global headlines moved on, the Pulitzer board recognized that bearing witness in real time to ethnic cleansing and war crimes remains essential.
- Closer to home, the joint Baltimore Banner–New York Times investigation into the fentanyl epidemic showed that local journalism still has the power to confront national failure. The reporting personalized overdose deaths, highlighting not just statistics but systemic neglect.
Each win reflects a different strand of the global fabric unraveling—and The Times’s ability to thread these stories together with impact.
The New Yorker: Longform Journalism with Global Reverberations
With three prizes, The New Yorker continued its tradition of in-depth, literary journalism that contextualizes suffering rather than simply reporting it.
- Mosab Abu Toha’s Commentary from Gaza stood out not for political partisanship but for its poetic restraint. Writing as a civilian in a war zone, his essays evoked the quiet dread of survival, turning tragedy into testimony.
- The podcast “In the Dark” won for its chilling investigation into the U.S. military’s killing of Iraqi civilians, connecting bureaucratic opacity to real-world carnage. In a media landscape often dominated by fast news, The New Yorker’s immersive reporting gave voice to victims and demanded accountability.
- Moises Saman’s images from Syria’s Sednaya prison—a facility synonymous with torture and mass incarceration—showed not just brutality, but the ghosts of authoritarianism that still linger far beyond Syria’s borders.
The New Yorker’s success signals that in an age of TikToks and 15-second headlines, depth still matters, and that the best journalism doesn’t just inform—it endures.
ProPublica: Public Service Journalism as a Moral Imperative
Winning the Public Service Pulitzer for the second consecutive year, ProPublica reasserted the value of independent, nonprofit journalism.
Its investigation into pregnant women dying in states with extreme abortion bans told a post-Roe story not through ideology, but through medical urgency and human cost. Reporters Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo, and Stacy Kranitz chronicled hospitals refusing care, doctors caught in legal limbo, and women dying preventable deaths in the name of legislation.
What sets ProPublica apart is its commitment to empirical advocacy—using data, interviews, and lived experience to not only expose injustice but force institutions to respond. Their win is a validation of journalism that doesn’t just break stories—it saves lives.
The Washington Post and Ann Telnaes: Journalism Under Pressure
The Washington Post was honored for its breaking news coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, a journalistic sprint under national duress. The recognition highlights how the Post remains a key player in national news, even as it struggles with internal challenges and public trust.
Yet the most striking subplot came with Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist who resigned from the Post in protest after the paper refused to publish her critique of tech billionaires cozying up to Trump—one of whom was Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner.
Her win serves as both vindication and warning: even elite newsrooms are not immune to conflicts of interest, internal censorship, or ownership influence. In awarding her, the Pulitzer Board effectively affirmed the independence of editorial voice, even when corporate oversight fails.
Broader Themes: A Press Under Fire, Yet Undeterred
This year’s winners collectively grappled with:
- Surging authoritarianism: from Syria to Sudan to threats inside the U.S.
- Health and bodily autonomy: with a chilling lens on abortion bans and overdose deaths.
- Erosion of democratic norms: with assassination attempts, misinformation, and media suppression.
But more importantly, they represent journalism’s counter-punch to these forces. They didn’t just tell stories—they investigated injustice, gave voice to victims, and brought accountability to the powerful.
In a world where the line between fact and fiction continues to blur, the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes reaffirmed that truth still matters—and that someone must chase it, even at great cost.
New York Times Wins New York Times Wins
