New York:

Like their communities, The Sun Herald of south Mississippi and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans took a beating from Hurricane Katrina. Their buildings were damaged, advertisers and subscribers were displaced and circulation dropped.

Their struggle to chronicle the catastrophe captured Pulitzer Prizes for public service, while The Washington Post took four Pulitzers and The New York Times won three.

The Times-Picayune was honoured for “heroic, multifaceted coverage” to “serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant,” and The Sun Herald for what the Pulitzer jurors called “valorous and comprehensive coverage” and “providing a lifeline for devastated readers”.

In the arts categories, the fiction prize went to March, Geraldine Brooks’ novel imagining the life of the father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Caroline Elkins won in general nonfiction for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.

Despite as many as 100 drama entries, none gained a majority vote of the 18-member Pulitzer board, and so it did not issue a drama award for the first time since 1997.

The Times-Picayune won Pulitzers in two categories — breaking news reporting and public service; and The Sun Herald also won a public service Pulitzer for its coverage of the hurricane that devastated the region in August.

The Times-Picayune used delivery trucks to save 240 employees when a broken levee flooded its location. The paper’s staff erupted in a mixture of applause and tears when word of the Pulitzers came, but the customary newsroom champagne toasts were missing.

“It was a national tragedy,” said Peter Kovacs, managing editor for news. “It would not be appropriate to have champagne.” We never missed a day of publication and that’s a testament to everybody in this room,” said Ricky Mathews, president and publisher of The Sun Herald. “We will arise from this terrible situation,” he added. “I think our best journalism is still ahead of us.”