Part of Politico’s political cartoonist Matt Wuerker’s works that won The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, for lampooning the partisan conflict that engulfed Washington.

The New York Times was the only multiple winner at the prestigious Pulitzer awards, which this year highlighted global issues and online reporting.

...the awards can bring badly needed attention to newspapers and websites competing for readers in a fragmented media industry...

The most prestigious prize in American journalism, the awards can bring badly needed attention to newspapers and websites competing for readers in a fragmented media industry, where many are suffering from budget constraints.

The New York Times paper picked up prizes for international reporting and explanatory reporting in a year with a number of first-time winners, including two online organisations: The Huffington Post, for national reporting and Politico, for editorial cartooning.

Agence France-Presse also won its first Pulitzer Prize, with Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini scooping up the honour for breaking news photography.

Mr Hossaini's picture of an Afghan girl standing among a pile of dead bodies captured the devastation in the immediate aftermath of the attack on a Shiite shrine and was published in newspapers and on websites around the world.

For the only time in more than three decades, the board declined to award winners in two categories, editorial writing and fiction.

Splitting the award for investigative reporting were: The Associated Press, for its probe of the New York Police Department’s monitoring of activities in Muslim communities, which prompted a public outcry; and The Seattle Times, for its look at the state government moving patients who were taking safer pain-control medication to cheaper but more dangerous methadone.

Alabama’s The Tuscaloosa News was awarded the prize for breaking news in its reporting around the devastating April tornado that struck its home town.

The Pulitzer Prize board cited The Tuscaloosa News for “using social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 80 kilometres away.”

A local Pennsylvania paper, The Patriot News, took home a Pulitzer in local reporting for its coverage of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, while another of the state’s papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer, won the coveted public service award.

Reporter Eli Sanders, 34, won the feature writing award, bringing home the first Pulitzer for The Stranger, the Seattle weekly with a circulation of 87,000.

His piece The Bravest Woman in Seattle was based on a rape victim’s testimony about the rape and murder of her partner.

Administered by Columbia University, the prizes are chosen by juries in categories across journalism, books, drama and poetry. Each winner receives $10,000 (€7,600).