Pulitzer Center Wins National Press Foundation's 2009 Excellence in Online Journalism Award

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has been awarded the 2009 Excellence in Online Journalism Award from the National Press Foundation.

"The Center is shedding light on issues that are both fascinating and tragically under-covered, such as refugees, homophobia, climate change and children and women in crisis," the judges said. "The Center's site is embracing the vastness of the Web and not trying to do all the heavy lifting on these topics by itself. While the Center offers rich photography and powerful images and terrific narrative pieces, the site also links off to a wider range of sources on each topic, acknowledging that the role of the journalist is not just to produce great journalism on a topic, but also to help surface other interesting content about that topic."

The judges were Jim Brady, Allbritton Communications; Len Apcar, International Herald Tribune; and Mitch Gelman, THX ltd. "We applaud the site's attempts at reaching out to the broader community via user-generated content and attempting to provide tips on how these pieces can be used as part of a school curriculum. Overall, we felt the combination of strong subject matter, terrific multimedia content and an extremely Web-friendly approach made the Pulitzer Center's entry the best of the year," they added.

View the Pulitzer Center's video presentation for the NPF award ceremony

View Jon Sawyer's acceptance of the award on behalf of the Pulitzer Center.