The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced from Columbia University Monday afternoon.

The Pulitzers are regarded as the highest honor a U.S.-based journalist or organization can receive.

This year’s awards come as universities across the country, including Columbia, grapple with protests over the war in Gaza. Much of Columbia’s Morningside campus has been closed to everyone except essential personnel and students living in on-campus residence halls. The Pulitzer board instead met at the corporate offices of The Associated Press.

Poynter President Neil Brown is co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Brown declined to discuss last week’s board deliberations, but offered:

“The journalism honored today connects with us on a personal level. Through service to our communities, large and small, and with exceptional storytelling at a time of conflict and confusion, journalists provide insight and reveal uncomfortable truths. The Pulitzer Prizes are essential to celebrating the value of that.”

During the announcement, the Pulitzer Prize Board renewed its call for Russia to free Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been wrongfully detained for more than a year. It also awarded two special citations this year — to the late writer and critic Greg Tate, and to journalists covering Gaza.

Read more about the winners and finalists below.

Breaking News Reporting

Awarded to the staff of Lookout Santa Cruz for its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of California residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses

Finalists

• Staff of the Honolulu Civil Beat for its distinctive, sweeping and urgent coverage of the Maui wildfires that killed more than 100 people and left a historic town in ruins, reporting that held officials to account and chronicled the aftermath and efforts to rebuild
• Staff of the Los Angeles Times for urgent and thoughtful coverage of a Lunar New Year overnight shooting that left 11 senior citizens dead, demonstrating clear knowledge of and commitment to the local Asian communities

Investigative Reporting

Awarded to Hannah Dreier of The New York Times for a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it

Finalists

• Staff of Bloomberg for a deep and rigorous investigation of how the U.S. government aided the global spread of gun violence, prompting the Biden administration to halt most gun exports for 90 days while it reviewed the federal government’s marketing relationship with gun manufacturers
• Casey Ross and Rob Herman of Stat for exposing how United Health Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, used an unregulated algorithm to override clinicians’ judgments and deny care, highlighting the dangers of artificial intelligence use in medicine

Explanatory Reporting

Awarded to Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker for a searing indictment of our legal system’s reliance on the felony murder charge and its disparate consequences, often devastating for communities of color

Finalists

• Staff of Bloomberg for rigorous, far-reaching reporting that holds corporate water profiteers to account and exposes how they willfully exacerbate the effects of climate change at the expense of less powerful communities
• Staffs of The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Frontline for advancing understanding of law enforcement’s catastrophic response to the mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school and also for documenting the political and policy shortcomings that have led to similar deadly police failures across the country

Local Reporting

Awarded to Sarah Conway of City Bureau and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute for their investigative series on missing Black girls and women in Chicago that revealed how systemic racism and police department neglect contributed to the crisis

Finalists

• Jerry Mitchell, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield of Mississippi Today and The New York Times for their detailed examination of corruption and abuse, including the torturing of suspects, by Mississippi sheriffs and their officers over two decades
• Staff of The Villages Daily Sun for its comprehensive investigation and moment-by-moment account of Florida officials’ inaction before, during and after Hurricane Ian, the deadliest storm to strike the state since 1935

Coming this summer: A Poynter report on the state of the news.

National Reporting

Awarded to the staff of Reuters for an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States

Awarded to the staff of The Washington Post for its sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which forced readers to reckon with the horrors wrought by the weapon often used for mass shootings in America

Finalists

• Bianca Vázquez Toness and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press for a deeply reported series on the corrosive effect of the pandemic on public education, highlighting the staggering number of students missing from classrooms across America
• Dave Philips of The New York Times for groundbreaking reporting that uncovered a pattern of traumatic brain injuries among U.S. troops from blast exposures caused by the weapons they were firing

International Reporting

Awarded to the staff of The New York Times for its wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza

Finalists

• Julie Turkewitz and Federico Rios of The New York Times for their immersive and ambitious coverage of migration purgatory in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama
• Staff of The Washington Post for a sweeping on-the-ground investigation in India that exposed the methodical undermining of the world’s largest democracy by Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist allies, who have deployed social media to foment hate and pressure American tech giants to bend to government power

Feature Writing

Awarded to Katie Engelhart, contributing writer to The New York Times, for her fair-minded portrait of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch’s progressive dementia that sensitively probes the mystery of a person’s essential self

Finalists

• Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project, co-published with The New York Times Magazine, for her insightful, humane portrait, reported with great difficulty, of men on Death Row in Texas who play clandestine games of “Dungeons and Dragons,” countering their extreme isolation with elaborate fantasy
• Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic for her beautifully rendered account of her disabled aunt, who was institutionalized as a small child, and the lasting effects on her family, told in the context of present-day care and intervention that makes different outcomes possible

Commentary

Awarded to Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor to The Washington Post, for passionate columns written at great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country

Finalists

• Brian Lyman of the Alabama Reflector for incisive columns that challenge of range of state policies flouting democratic norms and targeting vulnerable populations, written with the commanding authority of a veteran political observer
• Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker for provocative columns that urge us to examine popular narratives on such critical topics as affirmative action, racial politics and the portrayal of gun violence

Criticism

Awarded to Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times for richly evocative and genre-spanning film criticism that reflects on the contemporary moviegoing experience

Finalists

• Zadie Smith, contributor to The New York Review of Books, for a review of the film “Tár” that addressed with wit and ease such consequential themes as mortality and the clash of generations
• Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker for theater reviews that reflect a formidable knowledge of the stage and the mechanics of performance along with canny observations on the human condition

WATCH: Breaking down the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes with Poynter

Editorial Writing

Awarded to David E. Hoffman of The Washington Post for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics that authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age and how they can be fought

Finalists

• Isadora Rangel of the Miami Herald for a scathing series that roots the city’s multiple political scandals in a troubled local democracy and champions electoral reforms
• Brandon McGinley and Rebecca Spiess of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for ambitious, investigative editorials that examine a collapse in services for the homeless in Pittsburgh, and the city’s failure to account for millions of dollars meant to offer relief

Illustrated Reporting and Commentary

Awarded to Medar de la Cruz, contributor to The New Yorker, for his visually driven story, set inside Rikers Island jail, using bold black and white images, that humanize the prisoners and staff through their love of books

Finalists

• Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press for a portfolio of deceptively gentle, mostly wordless cartoons full of juxtapositions that ably communicate complex, sophisticated messages
• Angie Wang, contributor to The New Yorker, for a vivid illustrated journey with her toddler that explains how human language learning can never be supplanted by AI
• Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca and Ren Galeno, contributor, of The Washington Post, for a masterful and sensitive use of the comic form to reveal the story of a great injustice to a group of Filipinos exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where some of them died

Breaking News Photography

Awarded to the photography staff of Reuters for raw and urgent photographs documenting the Oct. 7 deadly attack in Israel by Hamas and the first weeks of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza

Finalists

• Adem Altan of Agence France-Presse for a heartbreaking image of a man clutching the hand of his deceased daughter a day after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria
• Nicole S. Hester of The Tennessean for a distressing image of a young girl looking out of a school bus in anguish as she is evacuated from the scene of a deadly shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville

Feature Photography

Awarded to the photography staff of The Associated Press for poignant photographs, chronicling unprecedented masses of migrants and their arduous journey north from Colombia to the border of the United States

Finalists

• Nanna Heitmann, contributor to The New York Times, for illuminating photographs portraying a generation living under President Vladimir Putin’s resurgent nationalism while Russia is at war in Ukraine
• Hannah Reyes Morales, contributor to The New York Times, for a creative series of photographs documenting a “youthquake” occurring in Africa where, by 2050, the continent will account for one-quarter of the world’s population and one-third of its young people

Audio Reporting

Awarded to the staffs of the Invisible Institute and USG Audio for a powerful series that revisits a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s, a fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism

Finalists

• Dan Slepian and Preeti Varathan, contributor, of NBC News, for their relentless 20-year investigation that resulted in a wrongfully convicted man finally receiving clemency
• Lauren Chooljian, Alison Macadam, Jason Moon, Daniel Barrick and Katie Colaneri of New Hampshire Public Radio for their gripping and extensively reported investigation of corruption and sexual abuse within the lucrative recovery industry that sought accountability despite legal pressure

Public Service

Awarded to ProPublica, for the work of Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Bretty Murphy, Alex Mierjeski and Kirsten Berg, groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court to reveal how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the court to adopt its first code of conduct

Finalists

• KFF Health News and Cox Media Group for uncovering millions of cases in which the Social Security Administration overpaid beneficiaries, then demanded immediate repayment, imposing debts on elderly and disabled people who had already spent the funds
• The Washington Post, for its sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which forced readers to reckon with the horrors wrought by the weapon often used for mass shootings in America

Special Citations

Greg Tate: The Pulitzer Board awards a special citation for the late writer and critic Greg Tate, whose language — cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip hop — was as influential as the content of his ideas. His aesthetic innovations and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip hop criticism, continue to influence subsequent generations, particularly writers and critics of color.

Journalists covering Gaza: In recent years, the Pulitzer Board has issued citations honoring journalists covering wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan. This year, the board recognizes the courageous work of journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza. Under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza. This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers among the casualties. As the Pulitzer Prizes honor categories of journalism, arts, and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.

The board also announced Letters, Drama and Music awards Monday, including for Fiction, Drama, History, Biography, Memoir or Autobiography, Poetry, General Nonfiction and Music.

More from Poynter on the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes:

• Lookout Santa Cruz, digital site with a backstory, wins Pulitzer for breaking news
• Small newsrooms won big in the 2024 Pulitzers
• The Invisible Institute won two Pulitzers this year. What is it?
• A sign of the times as Pulitzer Prizes are announced
• Pulitzers recognize coverage of Israel-Hamas war, honor journalists working in Gaza
• Among the Pulitzer Prize winners, where are the metros?
• Reuters wins Pulitzer for Israel-Gaza photography
• A rare illustrated look into Rikers wins a Pulitzer
• Associated Press wins Pulitzer for documenting arduous migration journeys 
• From the archives: Behind the Pulitzers: A look into the inner workings of journalism’s Super Bowl
• From the archives: How do you pronounce Pulitzer?