Bloomberg bags first Pulitzer, Reuters a finalist in two categories

Founder Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, was reported to have declared: "It's about time" when he found out the news.​

Three reporters from Reuters - Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman - were named finalists in the same explanatory reporting category for their work, which used data analysis to expose how an elite cadre of lawyers enjoys extraordinary access to the US Supreme Court. Reuters was also a 2015 finalist in the international reporting category for its reporting of the disintegration of Iraq and the rise of the group that calls itself Islamic State.  

Reuters won its first Pulitzer in 2008, when photojournalist Adrees Latif was awarded the prize for breaking news photography for an image of a Japanese photographer who was fatally wounded during unrest in Yangon. The agency’s first text Pulitzer followed in 2014, when Jason Szep and Andrew R. C. Marshall won in the international reporting category for a series of articles about the persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar.

The Pulitzers, named for American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer who established them in his will, are administered by Columbia University in New York and were first awarded in 1917. They are generally regarded as the world’s most prestigious journalism awards but US media critic Jack Shafer - a Reuters columnist until last year - called them a “scam” in a scathing column for Politico.

Shafer argued that journalism prizes are a dubious exercise in self-aggrandizement, with the Pulitzer the most “graven and craven” of them all. He said he had been proud never to have won a journalism prize until Reuters told him he had won an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. “I didn’t even know I’d been entered,” wrote Shafer, who complained that Reuters had ruined his streak. ■