Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler announces the Pulitzer Prizes winners at Journalism School of Columbia University in New York, the United States, April 20, 2009. The 93rd annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music were released here on Monday. [Shen Hong/Xinhua]

The Public Service award of the 93rd annual Pulizter Prizes in Journalism went to the Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon, for the exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced in New York Monday.

Scandal reporting played a role in a number of awards, such as the local reporting prize that went to the Detroit Free Press for disclosing the steamy text messages that led to the resignation and jailing of the city's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.

The New York Times received five Pulitzers, including one for breaking the call-girl scandal that destroyed New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's career.

The paper also won prizes for investigative and international reporting, as well as for feature photography and criticism.

The Explanatory Reporting award was awarded to Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times for their fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States.

The Detroit Free Press and the East Valley Tribune shared the Local Reporting award.

For the first time in its history, the St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. Staff writer Lane DeGregory won in the feature writing category for "The Girl in the Window," a moving account of a Plant City child whose mother kept her locked in a filthy room and a loving adoptive family who tried to draw her out from her feral beginnings. The Times staff won for national reporting for PolitiFact.com, a Web site and regular newspaper feature that tests the truthfulness of political statements.

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary Monday, but the newspaper's lone award represented a much smaller haul than the six it earned a year ago.

Robinson received journalism's top prize for his columns about the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the first African-American to win the nation's top job. Robinson, a former foreign correspondent and assistant managing editor for the paper, also is black.

Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star in Glens Falls has won a Pulitzer Prize award in the distinguished editorial category.

Pulitzer judges said they selected Mahoney for the award for "his relentless, down-to-earth editorials on the perils of local government secrecy, effectively admonishing citizens to uphold their right to know."

According to the Post-Star's Web site, Mahoney has been the editorial page writer for 10 years. He joined the paper as a reporter in 1988 and has served as city editor and reporter editor.

Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune added a second Pulitzer to his collection Monday as he took the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

Breen was bestowed the honor for "his agile use of a classic style to produce wide ranging cartoons that engage readers with power, clarity and humor," the Pulitzer committee stated.

Veteran Miami Herald photographer Patrick Farrell has been awarded Feature Photography award for his harrowing images of the victims of the storms that ravaged Haiti in 2008.

Farrell, 49, visited Haiti four times during last year's hurricane season, capturing scenes of the dead and the survivors of a series of storms that generated devastating flooding across the impoverished nation.

For first time, online-only news sites could compete in this year's Pulitzer Prize.

Since 2006, online content from newspaper Web sites had been permitted in all Pulitzer journalism categories, but online-only newspapers were not allowed to submit entries.

Entirely online entries were permitted in only two categories: breaking news coverage and breaking news photography. Despite the opportunity, there were no winners from online news sites.

(Xinhua News Agency April 21, 2009)