Pulitzers honor coronavirus pandemic, US protest coverage

The national reporting prize went to the staffs of The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute for an investigation into attacks on people by police K-9 units around the country.

BuzzFeed News won its first Pulitzer, in international reporting, for a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

Also, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists were finalists in that category for an expose on the global banking industry’s role in money laundering. A former U.S. Treasury Department employee was sentenced to six months in prison this month for leaking the trove of confidential financial reports that served as the basis for the series.

Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy of The Boston Globe received the investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series demonstrating the systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers.

McCarthy, the editor on the series, said the Globe “quickly found that this kind of tragedy had been happening year after year for decades. The problems were in plain sight but had never been addressed.”

The winner of the public service Pulitzer is honored with a gold medal. The awards in the other categories carry a prize of $15,000 each. The prizes are administered by Columbia University.