Los Angeles Times wins five Pulitzers

From combined dispatches

The Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes yesterday, including one for its breaking news coverage of the massive wildfires that ravaged Southern California last fall.

The newspaper also won a national reporting Pulitzer for its articles on how Wal-Mart’s competitive methods made the Arkansas-based company the world’s largest corporation. The Los Angeles Times won additional prizes for its “offbeat” car reviews, editorials on California’s troubled state government and photographs of Liberia’s civil war.

The five are the second-highest amount awarded to a newspaper in a single year. The New York Times won seven in 2002 primarily for its coverage of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and aftermath.

Besides the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal was the only other multiple winner. The Pulitzer for beat reporting went to Daniel Golden for his stories on university admission preferences given to children of alumni and donors. The Journal’s other award came for explanatory reporting by Kevin Helliker and Thomas M. Burton for coverage of aneurysms.

In a year when the war in Iraq dominated much of the news, only two Pulitzers went to journalists covering the U.S.-led invasion. Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post won the prize for international reporting for his Iraq coverage, while the prize for breaking news photography went to David Leeson and Cheryl Diaz Meyer of the Dallas Morning News for their photos from Iraq.

The prize for investigative reporting was awarded to Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss and Joe Mahr of the Blade of Toledo, Ohio, for their series about an elite Army unit accused of committing atrocities in Vietnam.

The commentary award went to Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald, while the editorial-cartooning prize went to Matt Davies of the Journal News in White Plains, N.Y.

The New York Times won the public service prize for its collaboration with the PBS program “Frontline” and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on worker safety at a company that manufactured cast-iron pipe.

The board made no award in the feature writing category — the first time since the category was added in 1979 that an award was not given. Each prize is worth $10,000, except for public service, which is recognized with a gold medal. The awards are given by Columbia University.

In Pulitzer arts prizes, books about the Soviet Union took two awards. Washington writer Anne Applebaum won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction for “Gulag: A History,” while William Taubman won the biography prize for “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.” The Pulitzer in history went to Steven Hahn for “A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration.”

Edward P. Jones won the fiction Pulitzer for his novel “The Known World.” Doug Wright’s play “I Am My Own Wife” won the drama prize. The Pulitzer in music went to Paul Morave for “Tempest Fantasy,” and the poetry prize went to Franz Wright for “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.”