In landmark moment for the digital publishing sector, AOL’s The Huffington Post has become the first blog to win the prestigious Pulitzer prize in the US.
The news site, formed in 2005, scooped American journalism’s top honor, winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
The Pulitzer committee honored reporter David Wood for what it called “his riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war.”
In a series of stories called “Beyond the Battlefield,” Wood drew on his more than four decades as a military affairs reporter to shed light on the special concerns of veterans from the United States’ most recent foreign conflicts.
The reporter, who formerly worked for the Los Angeles Times, is a lifelong Quaker who was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.
Huffington Post provides a combination of original and aggregated reports and opinion pieces. Its Los Angeles-based founder is longtime activist Arianna Huffington; she operates the Post in conjunction with media company AOL, which bought the firm last year for $315m.
Only in the last two years has the prize committee considered online journalism. The non-profit ProPublica has won two for its reporting.
Politico was the other “new media” website to win a Pulitzer in the editorial cartooning category.
The winners of journalism’s most important prize were decided by a board made up of two dozen journalism academics and journalists. The winners were announced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
The complete list was posted on the Pulitzer website.
