Washington Post, NY Times win Pulitzer Prizes

Dean Baquet (C), executive editor of The New York Times, celebrates the announcement of the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes in The Times office in New York, US, April 10, 2017. The New York Times won three awards — for breaking news photography, feature writing and international reporting. [Photo/Agencies]

NEW YORK - The Pulitzer Prizes on Monday honored The Washington Post for hard-hitting reporting on Donald Trump's presidential campaign and The New York Times for revealing Vladimir Putin's covert power grab, praising their probing of powerful people despite a hostile climate for the news media.

The Daily News of New York and ProPublica, a web-based platform specializing in investigative journalism, won the prizefor public service journalism for coverage of New York police abuses that forced mostly poor minorities from their homes.

Other winners included an international consortium of more than 300 reporters on six continents that exposed the so-called Panama Papers detailing the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens used by the high and mighty.

The Pulitzers, the most prestigious honors in American journalism, have been awarded since 1917, often going to famed publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

But they are also won by smaller, lesser known publications across the country whose work does not always gain national attention when it is published.

Reporter Eric Eyre of Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia took the prize for investigative reporting for exposing a flood of opioids in depressed West Virginia counties with the country's highest overdose death rates.

The staff of the East Bay Times of Oakland, California, won the breaking news award for coverage of the "Ghost Ship" fire that killed 36 people at a warehouse party, exposing the city's failure to take actions that might have prevented the disaster.