2011 Pulitzer Prize Runners-Up Announced

The Pulitzer Prize is a famous thing invented by some venal tabloid publisher in New York about five-hundred years ago. It would be like if Glenn Beck or TMZ.com created a prize for “Literary Excellence” or whatever, and then in the future people believed this was some actual honor and not just a weird prank. Anyway, you’ve maybe heard about the bankrupt Los Angeles Times winning a couple of awards, hooray!, and also some non-profit thing staffed by “veteran journalists” won an award for saying Wall Street is full of crooks, so good for them too. But what about the rarely discussed “second tier Pulitzers”?

Here are the Actual Winners:

PUBLIC SERVICE – Los Angeles Times

BREAKING NEWS REPORTING – No Award

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING – Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

EXPLANATORY REPORTING – Mark Johnson, Kathleen, Gallagher, Gary Porter, Lou Saldivar and Alison Sherwood of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

LOCAL REPORTING – Frank Main, Mark Konkol and John J. Kim of the Chicago Sun-Times

NATIONAL REPORTING – Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein of ProPublica

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING – Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry of The New York Times

FEATURE WRITING – Amy Ellis Nutt of The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.

COMMENTARY – David Leonhardt of The New York Times

CRITICISM – Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe

EDITORIAL WRITING – Joseph Rago of The Wall Street Journal

EDITORIAL CARTOONING – Mike Keefe of The Denver Post

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY – Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti of The Washington Post

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY – Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times

Here are the 2011 runners-up:

PUBIC SERVICE: Gawker, for that not-at-all-sexist story about Christine O’Donnell having pubic hair.

BREAKING NEWS REPORTING – The white men in the Washington Post newsroom, for freaking out because a black lady with big boobs was allowed to anchor the newspaper’s webcast. Link Fixed!

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING – Sarah Palin Online School of Journalism, for existing (in Sarah Palin’s mind).

EXPLANATORY REPORTING – Andrew Breitbart, for pointing out that the NAACP is actually racist.

LOCAL REPORTING – Associated Press, for this calming video of light rainfall in Pasadena, California.

NATIONAL REPORTING – Juli Weiner of VF Daily, for noticing Newt Gingrich hid his tweets about how much he loves slobbering on Easter candies.

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING – The website “Big Government,” for being the first (and only) news organization to report the capture of 9/11 bogeyman Mullah Omar. (Mullah Omar has not been captured.)

FEATURE WRITING – Kathryn Jean Lopez, for everything, but especially for this post about stuffing a turkey with an entire sack of White Castle hamburgers.

COMMENTARY – This guy standing by his Ford Taurus yelling at the Washington Post. (Runner-up: Richard Cohen.)

CRITICISM – Washington Post, for noting a grammatical error in a letter to Obama from a lady dying of cancer.

EDITORIAL WRITING – Joseph Rago of The Wall Street Journal.

EDITORIAL CARTOONING – The U.S. Department of State, for hilariously announcing “World Press Freedom Day” as it launched a global war against that guy with the Wikileaks website.

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY – Whatever random pest-control company somewhere posted the picture of the dead rat in the filthy toilet.

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY – The person responsible for this picture of Jeb Bush’s official portrait adorned with little cutouts of CNN’s Candy Crowley.

Congratulations, everybody! Next year, HuffAolPo will win it all!