The Pulitzer Prize Board debuted two new categories Monday, announcing winners in Beat Reporting and Opinion Writing.
The former was last awarded in 2006, while the latter is a result of the board combining the Editorial Writing and Commentary categories. It is the first major change to the prizes — the most prestigious award in journalism — since the board introduced the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category in 2022 as a replacement for Editorial Cartooning.
Reuters journalists Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham won the Beat Reporting category for their reporting on Meta, which revealed that the company has exposed users to scams, banned products and manipulation by artificial intelligence chatbots. New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen won in Opinion Writing for their reported essays about rising authoritarian regimes that drew from both history and personal experience.
The new categories in part reflect shifting priorities in newsrooms. In recent years, many outlets have moved away from opinion journalism, especially the unsigned editorials that had been honored by the Editorial Writing category. In 2022, that category received 51 entries, according to Pulitzer Prizes administrator Marjorie Miller. Last year, it received only 25 entries.
“Increasingly, they (editorials) were getting signed or had a name of a writer, and that was making them even more like opinion pieces, even though it was the paper’s position. And fewer and fewer papers were having editorial departments or were submitting,” Miller said. “So many papers were folding, and there were just not enough entries the board felt to make it a big and competitive category.”
The decline in entries reflects a broader trend of outlets pulling back from opinion journalism. In 2022, for example, Gannett (now known as USA Today Co.) announced it would cut back opinion pages in its more than 200 dailies to just a few days a week. Lee Enterprises, which owns more than 70 dailies, made similar changes around that time, according to Nieman Reports.
When Gannett made the change, executives cited surveys that found that readers don’t want to be told what to think and that opinion pieces led readers to perceive newspapers as biased.
In contrast with Editorial Writing, Commentary, which honored columns, has been relatively stable in the number of entries it has received in recent years. All three winners and finalists of Opinion Writing this year — which include Los Angeles Times’ Gustavo Arellano and The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof — are columnists.
In bringing back the Beat Reporting category, the Pulitzer Prize board was attempting to be “a little bit more expansive,” Miller said. The board felt that beat reporting had become “underrepresented” in the Local and National Reporting categories, which tend to be dominated by breaking news coverage or investigative projects.
The board defined Beat Reporting as “sustained, ongoing coverage by up to two reporters on a beat or topic of significant public interest, demonstrating originality and deep expertise.” Beats could be local, statewide or national.
When the board first announced the new category in November, it also tweaked the definitions of the Local Reporting and Breaking News categories. The latter was limited to a timeframe of one week after the initial event, while the former focused on “coverage of significant issues of concern to a local community, city or state, demonstrating originality and continuous community connection.”
Miller said that in resurrecting the Beat Reporting category, the board thought it could offer local journalists more opportunities to win a Pulitzer. (In the past few years, for-profit metro papers have been underrepresented among winners, though that trend has been bucked this year by wins by The Minnesota Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and The Dallas Morning News.)
But this year, all three Beat Reporting winners and finalists — which included The New York Times’ Hamed Aleaziz and The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff — came from outlets with a national reach.
More on this year’s Pulitzers
- Here are the winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes
- The Pulitzer winners offer a snapshot of journalism’s priorities and its changing power structure
- A church shooting shook Minneapolis. The Star Tribune’s newsroom responded together — and won a Pulitzer.
- Pablo Torre left the worldwide leader in sports to start a podcast. It just won a Pulitzer.
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