New York, April 11: The Washington Post won three Pulitzer Prizes, including the public service award for the second year in a row. The Wall Street Journal took two honors, and Associated Press one for investigative reporting on the killing of civilians by US troops at the start of the Korean War.Denver's two daily newspapers each won a Pulitzer yesterday for their coverage of the massacre at Columbine High School, which has come to symbolize America's gun-violence epidemic. The staff of The Denver Post won for breaking news reporting and The Denver Roc ky Mountain News photo staff won the spot news photography award.Carol Guzy, Michael Williamson and Lucian Perkins of The Washington Post won the feature photography award for covering the plight of the Kosovo refugees. The winning images included a heartbreaking picture of a little boy being untangled from a barbed wire fence he was trying to climb.Washington Post reporters won two other Pulitzers: In public service for stories exposing neglect and abuse in local group homes for the mentally retarded, and in the criticism category for Henry Allen's writing about photography.The public service prize marks the first time in the history of the award dating to 1918 that any paper has won that category twice running. Last year the Post won for a series on reckless gunplay by poorly trained police that showed that officers in the nation's capital had shot and killed more people per capita in the 1990s than any other large American police force.This year's winning stories forced officials to acknowledge the conditions in the group homes and begin reforms.``I'll think of it as a day The Washington Post set a small stone down in the dirt of an unmarked grave," said reporter Katherin Boo, the lead reporter on the series.The Wall Street Journal's two prizes came for national reporting on US defence spending and military deployment in the post-Cold War era and for commentary for Paul Gigot's columns on politics and government."I want to thank President Clinton for doing so much for the cause of political journalism," Gigot said.The Associated Press won for uncovering the alleged killing by US troops of hundreds of civilians in the South Korean village of No Gun Ri.In interviews with veterans and survivors, AP Special Correspondent Charles J Hanley, reporters Martha Mendoza and Sang-hun Choe confirmed accounts of the mass shooting, which dates to 1950, the first year of the Korean War.AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft collaborated on the project by combing US military archives for supporting evidence.
