The New York Times won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, bringing to 127 its total since the annual journalism awards were first given out more than a century ago.
The Times was recognized this year for its reporting that raised legal and moral questions about how President Trump built his business empire and for editorial writing that shed light on race in modern America. Read the work below or browse all of the 2019 Pulitzer winners and finalists. Here’s a list of all of the awards and recognition The Times has received over the past century.
Explanatory Reporting: The Trump Family Finances
David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner received the award for explanatory reporting in recognition of their work providing an unprecedented look at the Trump family’s finances and poking holes in the myth that Mr. Trump has cultivated of himself as a self-made billionaire. They reported that Mr. Trump had actually inherited much of his wealth from his father and had participated in questionable tax schemes, including outright fraud.
The investigation built on a 2016 article for which the three reporters obtained Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax records. Motivated by that reporting, which showed how the president could have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades, the reporters set out to paint a picture of Mr. Trump’s finances from 1995 to 2005.
Their efforts lasted more than a year, combing through over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewing multiple key sources. Along the way, they made a number of revelations.
“We just kept finding stuff and finding stuff,” Ms. Craig said when the article was published.
Among the revelations: that Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, had skirted paying taxes on millions of dollars in gifts to his children by using a middleman company, All County Building Supply & Maintenance.
The investigation was published on the front page of The Times on Wednesday, Oct. 3. The next day, New York City officials said that they and state regulators had started to examine whether the Trump family had underpaid taxes over several decades.
Editorial Writing: Race in America
Brent Staples, a member of the editorial board of The Times, received the prize for editorial writing for a series of essays showing how America continues to be tormented by its racist past. It is the first The Times has won an award in the category in 23 years.
Digging into such subjects as the suffrage movement’s betrayal of black women, racist tropes and monuments to white supremacy, Mr. Staples brought attention to lesser-known stories. In May, for example, he wrote about how Southern newspapers perpetuated racial violence.
“The real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as ‘fiends,’ ‘brutes,’ ‘born criminals’ or, that catchall favorite, ‘troublesome Negroes,’” he wrote. “The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.”
Mr. Staples also wrote at length about the recently discovered remains of 95 African-Americans in Sugar Land, Tex., and the debate over what to do with them. The remains, he argued, should be memorialized where they were found because of what they revealed about efforts in the southern sugar industry to replace slave labor with an infamous convict-leasing system.
“Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake,” he wrote.
Mr. Staples, a 34-yearTimes veteran, joined editorial board in 1990. Before that, he served as an editor on The New York Times Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news.
