Pulitzer Winners Showcase Web Power

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes highlight excellent examples of online work in breaking news, public service and feature journalism.

About one-fifth of entries contained some online elements and web-based stories are well represented among the award winners, reports Poynter Online.

The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for its “multi-faceted coverage” of the Virginia Tech shootings both in print and online.

And the Post also achieved the gold medal in the Public Service category for its investigations into the treatment of veterans in a military hospital.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography is a striking example of effective multimedia storytelling from the Concord Monitor.

Remember Me uses photograph slideshows and audio clips to chronicle the experiences of a wife and mother dying from cancer.

The six-part feature has many poignant images and includes moving interviews with the family.

Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler has confirmed that the number of entries containing online elements is growing each year.

He told Poynter: “Entrants are getting better at integrating single, unified elements into Pulitzer entries, instead of dropping in a kind of digital glob (we say entire Web sites should not be submitted as part of the core entry).”

Gissler added: “We will continue to refine our procedures and monitor the whole field.”