Congratulations to the NOLA Times Picayune and the Biloxi Sun Herald

The NOLA Times Picayune and the Biloxi Sun Herald share the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service:

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material, a gold medal.

Two Prizes of a gold medal each:

Awarded to the Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss., for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.

and:

Awarded to The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant. (Selected by the Board from the Public Service category, where it was entered.)

Congratulations to both newspapers for their outstanding work.

The Times Picayune also won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. The hard-earned honor is well deserved, as mentioned here previously:

The New Orleans Times-Picayune... is no longer part of mainstream media. It's in a class of its own. Katrina tore the newspaper down to its most basic element - reporting. For anyone paying attention, that reporting may very well have transformed journalism, with heroic reporters and staff leading the way.

In fact, I recall saying they deserved a Pulitzer back in Sept. 2005. The Times Picayune awards coverage notes that:

This year for the first time, the Pulitzer Prize board allowed a newspaper to submit material that appeared originally in online form, in addition to printed stories, as a part of their entries.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, The Times-Picayune's continuously updated online blog, as well as its online editions of the paper posted each night on its affiliated Web site, NOLA.com, became the source of information for more than 1 million residents who had evacuated, and for much of the world.

In his remarks, Amoss acknowledged the contribution of the staff at NOLA.com, "who were integral to everything we published, and made us an around-the-clock vital link to readers scattered across the nation."

Visits, or "hits," to Times-Picayune pages on NOLA.com increased from an average of about 800,000 page views a day before Katrina to more than 30 million page hits a day in the days after the storm. Excerpts from those blogs, as well as stories from the online editions of the paper, made up a portion of both of the newspaper's winning Pulitzer entries.

Read the whole thing. It's quite an incredible story about the people who bring us the stories. Congratulations again to both newspapers.