Among those who won journalism's top honors were The New York Times' David Barstow for Investigative Reporting, The Times' Staff for Breaking News Reporting, and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post for Commentary.

Newsweek's Jon Meacham also won for his biography of Andrew Jackson

The New York Times was the big winner with five awards (which included criticism and feature photography). Bill Keller, The New York Times' executive editor, has gathered his team on the third floor of the New York Times Building to celebrate the news. Last year, Mr. Keller sounded a less-than-triumphant note about the whole notion of prizes, telling Times staffers, “Prizes are not why we do what we do, and prizes are not how we measure what we do. ... Prize juries are human. They can be arbitrary. They can be political. They can be sentimental. They can miss the point. There are countless examples of truly great reporters who will not have a Pulitzer in the lede of their obituaries—and of profoundly important work that never gets a trophy.”

We're assuming this year he sounds a little different.

The breaking-news-reporting prize went to the paper for the story that brought down the former New York governor and this week's Newsweek cover boy, Eliot Spitzer. (So, it's a good and bad week for Mr. Spitzer!) The international reporting prize was for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Damon Winter was awarded his feature photography prize for his coverage of the Obama campaign, and Holland Cotter won his criticism prize for his art writing.

News of The Times' good day was widely leaked on Niemanlab's Twitter feed, as well as Editor & Publisher's E&P Pub blog and Gawker.

Here's the list, courtesy of the official Pulitzer site:

JOURNALISM:

Public Service - Las Vegas Sun

Breaking News Reporting - The New York Times Staff

Investigative Reporting - David Barstow of The New York Times

Explanatory Reporting - Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times

Local Reporting -

Detroit Free Press Staff and

Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ

National Reporting - St. Petersburg Times Staff

International Reporting - The New York Times Staff

Feature Writing - Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times

Commentary - Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post

Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times

Editorial Writing - Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY

Editorial Cartooning - Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune

Breaking News Photography - Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald

Feature Photography - Damon Winter of The New York Times

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC:

Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Drama - Ruined by Lynn Nottage

History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)

Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)

Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)

General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

Music - Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA (Boosey & Hawkes)

More from Politico's story:

Mr. Barstow, the Pulitzer- and Peabody-winning investigative reporter, was on the phone Sept. 12, shortly before The Times began this year’s round of legal seminars for the staff.

The sessions, led by Times lawyers George Freeman and David McCraw, have traditionally offered a brush-up on privacy, sourcing and general newsgathering. But executive editor Bill Keller announced in a staff memo that the 2006 version would address “the persistent legal perils that confront us.”

“The main worry these days is not libel, or proving that you actually quoted something accurately,” said Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor. “It is being subpoenaed.”

The new legal curriculum dates back to August 2005, when reporter Judith Miller was sitting in the Alexandria Detention Center for refusing to identify a confidential source for Mr. Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Mr. Barstow said that Mr. Keller asked him then “to write him a memo about how to protect sources.”

Since that initial memo, Mr. Barstow has been working alongside Mr. Freeman and Mr. McCraw to give training sessions on how reporters can practice their craft while keeping the threat of prosecution in mind.

“With this crazy environment, with subpoenas and so on, there is this feeling that you have to act like a drug dealer or a Mafioso,” Mr. Barstow said. “We don’t have any reason to think right now that there aren’t going to be more of these cases. So we should take precautions. It’s just no longer an abstract threat.”

The first of the new legal seminars was held at lunchtime on Sept. 12 in the paper’s executive dining room. Afterward, Mr. McCraw declined to specify how many reporters had attended, but said that Mr. Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson had not been there.

Last month, in another case involving Ms. Miller and Mr. Fitzgerald, a New York appeals court ruled that the prosecutor could seize her and reporter Philip Shenon’s phone records in connection with their reporting on Islamic charities. There have been rumblings about leak investigations into The Times’ much-publicized stories about N.S.A. wiretapping and the monitoring of banking records.

And in a case not involving The Times, this month San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams appealed a decision that could put them behind bars for withholding confidential sources from their reporting on the BALCO sports-steroids case.

“I think people are more concerned because of the fallout from all the high-profile cases—BALCO, Judy Miller and others,” Mr. McCraw said. “You have decisions that have cast doubt on reporters’ rights to hold confidential sources. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Some of Mr. Barstow’s recommendations have the sound of advice for reporting behind the Iron Curtain before the fall—recalling A.M. Rosenthal burning his notes as a reporter in Communist Poland.

Mr. Barstow said he suggests disposing of story drafts and cutting back on telephone and e-mail contact with sources—or using disposable cell phones for important calls. Reporters should be wary of meeting sources at their offices, Mr. Barstow said, so as to avoid sign-in sheets and security cameras.

In another point of conflict between bureaucracy and confidentiality, Mr. Barstow said he has recommended altering Times expense-sheet forms so that a reporter does not have to list the names of sources who have been taken out for lunch or dinner.

And what about the original paper trail that reporters create for themselves? The very first discussion question on Mr. Keller’s memo promoting the seminar was “Should a reporter keep his notes?”

Last year’s Miller-Fitzgerald showdown was dragged into overtime—even after Ms. Miller had collected a source waiver to discuss her conversations with Vice Presidential chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—by a dispute over the provenance of the words “Valerie Flame” in one of her notebooks.

“It has been the subject of a lot of legal discussions since Judy Miller,” Mr. Whitney said. “Reporters have been encouraged not to keep their notes longer than necessary.”

“We have had a lot of discussion about getting rid of notes some period of time after publication,” Mr. Barstow said. He said it could prove unwise to leave notebooks “gathering dust for months and months.”

And the modern trail is as likely to be digital. “Actually, it’s gotten a lot easier to keep notes,” said Times deputy national editor David Firestone. Reporters, he said, now can type on a computer during a phone call, or transfer files from a digital audio recording to their hard drives.

Whatever the format, The Times has no particular rule about preservation or destruction.

“There’s no formal policy,” Mr. Freeman said. “Each reporter is fully entitled to make decisions about which of his notes he keeps on his own. I just know that all of the various permutations—what the needs of a journalist might be—it would be very difficult to write a policy that would take into account those needs and not undercut the journalism.”

E-mail, Mr. Barstow said, might be easier to tidy up than note-keeping. “There has been a conversation about changing our e-mail system so that e-mail is automatically deleted after 30 days unless you mark the e-mail for preservation,” Mr. Barstow said.

At Time Inc., which was caught up in Mr. Fitzgerald’s leak investigation by way of former Time reporter Matt Cooper, editor in chief John Huey sent out new reporting and writing guidelines in February, including a section about the keeping of electronic records.

“Reporters and editors should be extremely careful about how and where they store information that might identify an unnamed source,” it read. “Most electronic records, including email, can be subpoenaed and retrieved in litigation.”

“One lesson we’ve learned over the past year or two is that you don’t have confidential information in e-mail unless it is sent to a lawyer, too,” said Time Inc. managing editor Jim Kelly, who was managing editor of Time magazine when Mr. Cooper was there.

In his new position with Time Inc., Mr. Kelly said, he hopes to “soon start up a series of sessions about legal and ethical issues.”

Mr. Kelly said he does not plan any blanket policy about eliminating notes or tape recordings. “How many times have we seen a sports figure, a celebrity or a politician that denies saying something?” Mr. Kelly said. “These things are a reporter’s friend.”

Mr. Barstow said he has taken part in six or seven training sessions already with various departments, including the metro desk.

“We still have to put out a newspaper,” said Mr. Barstow. “We’re on deadlines. You can’t take this to the point of absurdity. It’s like weatherproofing your house. It’s about taking the steps that at least make it more difficult for prosecutors.”

—Michael Calderone

Big-Town Reporter Spurs Small-Paper Feud

Last month, New York Times Sunday Styles columnist Bob Morris aimed a finicky gaze at the upstate town where he and his partner, literary agent Ira Silverberg, keep a second home.

Mr. Morris, 48, meant to poke fun at the clash between his own metropolitan snootiness and small-town reality. “When I’m there,” he wrote, “I see a new gas station with a sign so big I’m convinced it’s illegal, a market that would be adequate only if you could eat lottery tickets, fishing camps that resemble trailer parks, a river that shouldn’t be so brown, and an unpainted gazebo off Main Street that makes a tiny park look like a cluttered lawn furniture outlet.”

“I didn’t think anyone would notice,” Mr. Morris said. “I didn’t even name the town.”

But Phoenicia, a hamlet in the larger Ulster County town of Shandaken, total population 3,225, did notice. And Mr. Morris’ “Age of Dissonance” column has become fodder for a local newspaper war.

“Why do people coming into our town believe that everything has to conform with their idea of paradise and should be painted white?” wrote Blake Killen in an editorial in the Ulster County Townsman.

The Townsman, a weekly with a cover price of 75 cents, is the conservative newspaper of record for Phoenicia and Shandaken. Mr. Killen is its editor, as well as its sole writer, reporter and photographer.

Mr. Killen said he had circulated a few photocopies of The Times column when it came out, and that people made copies of the copies and it “skyrocketed from there.” Besides the editorial, the paper has run four letters to the editor more or less telling Mr. Morris and “his partner Ira” to shut up or clear out. Mr. Killen said he elected not to run 10 other letters, which had “either made an issue of Mr. Morris’ sexuality or were just downright nasty.”

And the Townsman’s readers weren’t only upset with the representative of The New York Times. They also vented anger about another, closer Times: The Phoenicia Times, the town’s free liberal weekly.

The Townsman and The Phoenicia Times are at odds on local issues, particularly the new Bel Air Resort development (the Townsman is pro, The Times con).

Phoenicia Times editor Brian Powers had been quoted in Mr. Morris’ column as urging unhappy newcomers to work on changing the things they didn’t like. He also endorsed Mr. Morris’ complaint about the stained wood gazebo. Mr. Morris described Mr. Powers as “a transplanted New Yorker who started our upstate town’s newspaper five years ago.”

“Mr. Brian Powers did make change when he came to town and started his newspaper—he is the author of the age of ‘dissonance’ in our town,” wrote resident Elizabeth Holland Kern on the Townsman letters page. “By the way, Mr. Morris, Mr. Power’s newspaper is not our town newspaper, thank heavens. I refer to it as the ‘enquirer’ of Phoenicia, since it contains a similar amount of truth.”

In the last five years, there has been an influx of New York City dwellers moving to the Catskills, spawning a certain tension between wealthier newcomers and locals who felt they were being priced out of their own town. “Property values have quadrupled,” said Rick Ricciardella, of Ricciardella Realty. “They just sold a place in the middle of town for $259,000, which to my mind wasn’t worth $159,000.”

The Townsman, which dates back to 1953, caters more to the established residents, Mr. Killen said.

“I think there might have been an attempt to feed the antagonism between sentiments of some of the older residents and some of the newer residents,” said Mr. Powers. “Though I would not want to speculate on Mr. Killen’s motives,” he hastened to add.

Mr. Morris has encountered fallout from the column more directly, as well. The weekend after his column appeared, he said, he went to get his morning paper at the country store on the four-block-long Main Street. The friendly old woman behind the counter presented him with a printout of the piece. “She had circled my little slam on people with gnomes in their front yard,” Mr. Morris said. “Then she said, ‘You know I sell these things.’ I was so fucking busted, it was unbelievable.”

Mr. Morris had also lamented the unavailability of arugula in town. Jacqueline Guglielmetti, the deputy clerk at the town hall and a friend and neighbor of Mr. Morris, left some potted arugula from her garden on his doorstep.

“I was sort of teasing him,” Ms. Guglielmetti said. “We do know what arugula is.”

Mr. Ricciardella, 60, who sold Mr. Morris and Mr. Silverberg their home two years ago, said there was still hope for the couple. “This will blow over, people will forget,” he said. “But before you write things like that, you got to research it a little bit. This was a hunting town 40 years ago.

“Phoenicia is unique,” he continued. “It’s a quaint little town. We like it the way it is. We’re not like Woodstock. We don’t want to be like Woodstock …. Everyone in Woodstock thinks they’re Burt Reynolds.”

Mr. Silverberg knows all too well that Phoenicia is not Woodstock. He used to have a house there, but Mr. Morris, his partner of three years, did not approve. Mr. Morris had deemed the interior chic enough—it was decked out in Herman Miller chairs and George Nelson sofas, he recalled—but there was no view.

“I’m sorry this whole thing blew up,” said Mr. Silverberg. “Because he already had us move out of one town. I hope he makes amends to the community, because we really like it in Phoenicia. The wonder of living with Bob Morris is that [the column] really could have been about any town. He’s definitely the person that will walk down the street and pick out the house that hasn’t been painted in 10 years. But, you know, we need to love our curmudgeons, too.”

Last week, the Townsman published a letter from Mr. Morris begging Phoenicia’s forgiveness. It concluded, “Next time I criticize a beautiful place it’ll be the Hamptons, OK?”

—Spencer Morgan

"Who bothers to read New York anymore?" Ms. Miller asked on Tuesday afternoon.

The day before, New York magazine had posted the contents of its latest issue on the Web. And the likely answer, at the moment, would have been: Just about everybody. At least, just about everybody who knows Ms. Miller, or who holds any sort of opinion about her work at The New York Times .

In New York , Franklin Foer had presented a lengthy, much-anticipated and highly unflattering profile of Ms. Miller, the Pulitzer winner who reported extensively on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war-and who is now bearing the brunt of their absence.

It's been a tough stretch for Ms. Miller and her work. On May 20, police in Baghdad raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who had long been the public face of opposition to Saddam Hussein. The same week, the U.S. cut off Mr. Chalabi's funding.

As a lobbyist against the old regime, Mr. Chalabi-and his organization, the Iraqi National Congress-had been a key source for Ms. Miller's scoops about Mr. Hussein's arsenal. The nameless sources who'd told Ms. Miller about bioterror labs, aluminum nuclear-centrifuge tubes and assorted other frightening details had been I.N.C. sources. And now the I.N.C. was on the skids.

Meanwhile, after months of reluctance, The Times had reversed course on Ms. Miller's work. On May 26, the paper ran an editor's note declaring that, having "studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype" in the run-up to war, it was "past time we turned the same light on ourselves." The note studiously avoided naming Ms. Miller, saying that the problems with prewar coverage were "more complicated" than any single reporter's alleged misdeeds. But it listed a series of flawed stories, mostly Ms. Miller's handiwork.

Four days later, public editor Daniel Okrent, who had previously ruled Ms. Miller's prewar reporting off-limits, took his own whack at the topic-and named Mr. Miller.

As if that weren't enough fodder for speculation-was it more damning or less for the editor's note to have avoided naming names?-the avenging, undead wraith of Howell Raines had entered the fracas.

In an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times , which he c.c.'d to the entire journalistic community via the Poynter Institute's Web site, Mr. Raines complained that the current editors had never asked him, the executive editor under whom many of the problem stories were written, for input into their note. But while he had the floor, Mr. Raines allowed that the blame should probably fall on an array of his subordinate editors-including, by lucky chance, the ones who'd succeeded him: now–executive editor Bill Keller and now–managing editor Jill Abramson.

"Ms. Abramson … supervised a significant amount of Ms. Miller's reporting and personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper," Mr. Raines noted.

Then came Mr. Foer, who painted Ms. Miller as an out-of-control shrew, guilty of crimes ranging from commandeering a junior colleague's desk to apparently, in younger years, having flouted Abe Rosenthal's dictum about fucking the elephants and covering the circus. In the prewar period, by Mr. Foer's account, Ms. Miller was intoxicated by her access to high-powered sources and capable of browbeating Times editors into letting her run sketchy reports without interference.

Mr. Foer's piece "speaks for itself in its sleaziness," Ms. Miller said-then asked to strike that remark from the record. For further comment, she deferred to David Barstow, another Pulitzer winner ("He did this year what I did in 2002").

Mr. Barstow said that Ms. Miller had referred Mr. Foer to him, giving the New York writer his cell-phone number. But Mr. Foer, he said, had never called.

"I would have told him on the record how much I admire Judy's passion for the news," Mr. Barstow said.

Why the omission? "I think that guided by anonymous sources with suspect motives, he knew what his story was going to say, and he didn't want to muddy it with facts that didn't support his thesis," Mr. Barstow said. He paused. "Sound familiar?"

In a building where the Irony-O-Meters are so shaky that The Times could run the editor's note lamenting the burial of one important follow-up story on page A10 on page A10 , nuance is a dangerous art.

"The same charge that's leveled against her," Mr. Barstow explained.

The attacks on his colleague, Mr. Barstow continued, disgusted him. "It's really sickening for me to watch her get trashed by media critics who have never put themselves on the line the way she has," he said.

In that, Mr. Barstow echoed Mr. Keller's quoted comments in the New York piece: "It's a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy's laptop," Mr. Keller reportedly told Mr. Foer.

So on the one hand, The Times is declaring that the investigation into its W.M.D. coverage is "unfinished business," to be continued with "aggressive reporting." On the other hand, Mr. Keller is adopting the surly defensiveness of a failed relief pitcher, snapping about sportswriters who've never played the game. (Though thanks to the Iraq campaign, a whole new generation of reporters should now have a Red Badge of Courage that entitles them to tote Ms. Miller's computer.)

Where, then, does this leave Ms. Miller? One rumor in the building had the brass, in the ultimate stand-by-your-woman gesture, preparing to send her back to Iraq. Ms. Miller declined to address that speculation. "I am continuing on this story," she said, "and I don't discuss where I'm going with anyone."

The Times declined to comment on the Foer story. But a spokesperson was more forthcoming about Ms. Miller's itinerary. Is Ms. Miller Baghdad bound?

"No," the spokesperson wrote via e-mail. "We have no such plans."

Certain crimes are made for the tabloid press. So when the body of missing 21-year-old Juilliard acting student Sarah Fox turned up in Inwood Hill Park on May 26, the New York Post and the Daily News indulged their natural habits. The two offered a barrage of reports on the SLAIN JUILLIARD COED, strangled by a BUM or a SEX SICKO who police at first speculated had left a CREEPY "CULT" CLUE of flower petals by her body. By the weekend, both papers-overwhelmed with sympathy for the young, helpless victim-had put themselves on a first-name basis with Sarah (or SLAIN SARAH, as the Post put it).

That's what tabs do. But in the case of Ms. Fox, they weren't doing it alone. There was another formidable traveler on the low road from sensationalism to bathos: The New York Times .

The Times ' copy desk may be immune to the infinitely conjugatable charms of HUNT and SLAY, but that didn't stop the Metro staff from wallowing-albeit in its own effete way. The coverage read like a Law & Order: SVU script as run through a creative-nonfiction workshop, all purpling prose and dramatic syntax.

Thus, as follow-up coverage unspooled at West 43rd Street last week, what had been a plain "naked body" reappeared, delicately balanced on a comma, as "a woman's body, naked and decomposing." The victim "described by acquaintances as an energetic actress" on May 26 had become by the next day "a radiant young woman with a repertoire of special hugs, imbued with talent and brimming with hope." The crime scene was transformed from a "thickly wooded area" to "a steep embankment thick with trees and brush."

Not even Juilliard escaped the inflation. "The rarefied air of its sleekly modern buildings have [ sic ] produced a long list of hallowed names," N.R. Kleinfeld and Ian Urbina explained on May 27, for the benefit of Times readers unfamiliar with the arts school, "including Miles Davis, Philip Glass, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Nina Simone, and Robin Williams." (The Post , listing alumni, stuck to Mr. Williams, Christopher Reeve and Val Kilmer.)

Adding much-needed depth to a compelling story? Or pandering? To find out, Off the Record subjected The Times ' day-by-day coverage of the crime to scientific analysis, using the "Readability Statistics" function of Microsoft Word.

The results were striking and unambiguous. On May 26, The Times ran "Body in Inwood Hill Park May Be Missing Juilliard Student," by Thomas J. Lueck. According to Microsoft Word, the average sentence in Mr. Lueck's account contained 25.0 words, and the text was written at a 12th-grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. The next day's follow-up, "For Shining Light at Juilliard, a Tragic End in a Remote Spot," by Mr. Kleinfeld and Mr. Urbina, had dropped to 19.1 words per sentence and a grade level of 9.7.

The Post and Daily News , meanwhile, were humming along at steady grade levels: the Post mostly between 10th and 11th grade (dipping down to eighth grade for a human-interest sidebar); the Daily News consistently at the upper end of ninth grade.

But The Times was just loosening up for the limbo contest. On May 28, the double-jointed Gray Lady delivered its most deeply stooping work of all: "Lovely Woods, Full of Menace and a Body." In it, writer Alan Feuer ventured into Inwood Hill Park to meditate on glaciation, the Lenape Indians and the "ticking silence" of the woods where Ms. Fox's body had been found. "There is not much to hear except the sound of your breath," Mr. Feuer wrote, using the reportorial second person.

Mr. Feuer's essay favored the mythic over the investigative; faced with police avowals that the park is safe, he found a civilian in Inwood Hill to tell him about public urination and "rumors of rapes and corpses." Unable to find the crime scene, he settled for the spookily ironic discovery of "a 'missing' poster, with a picture of her face."

The result was a singularly untaxing piece of writing. By Microsoft Word's count, Mr. Feuer produced a Beverly Cleary–esque 15.6 words per sentence, writing at a grade level of 6.6.

"Off the Record needs Microsoft Word to tell them what's good writing?" Mr. Feuer said when informed of the result. "How's that?"

But Mr. Feuer was pleased by the software's verdict.

"My sixth-grade teacher was a woman named Mary Krogness," Mr. Feuer said, "and she was perhaps the best writing teacher I ever had."

GRADE LEVEL, LEAD JUILLIARD-MURDER STORIES, DAY BY DAY:

5/26: Times 12.0; Post 10.5; Daily News 9.9

5/27: Times 9.7; Post 11.7; Daily News 9.8

5/28: Times 6.6; Post 10.4; Daily News 9.8

WORDS PER SENTENCE, LEAD JUILLIARD-MURDER STORIES, DAY BY DAY:

5/26: Times 25.0; Post 21.4; Daily News 15.5

5/27: Times 19.1; Post 24.7; Daily News 20.3

5/28: Times 15.6; Post 20.9; Daily News 18.6

Negotiations between the union representing The Wall Street Journal 's staff and their bosses at Dow Jones and Company have dragged out to the point where the union, IAPE 1096, is getting fidgety. After a fruitless bargaining session last Wednesday, negotiators announced to the newsroom that they are asking management to agree to turn the process over to a mediator.

Dow Jones announced in April that its first-quarter sales were up sharply over those for 2003, but word from the staff side of the bargaining table is that the company is still set on last year's austerity plan: higher health premiums and lower raises for employees. At a newspaper where ad sales are up a reported 6.3 percent, that makes for a "very explosive and nasty mix," one staffer said.

Another staffer described the request for a mediator-who could come either from the federal government or a private firm-as a sign of a serious impasse in negotiations.

An impasse wouldn't be a good thing for Dow Jones, considering that in February the IAPE took the unprecedented step of forming a strike committee; organizers told Off the Record in March the move was made to satisfy reporters and copy editors that a strike would remain under consideration.

Though management rebuffed the union's initial request for mediation, the company and the union were discussing the possibility again at press time. A bargaining session remained scheduled for Thursday morning.