One Pulitzer winner in business journalism

A year after there were four business news-related winners among the Pulitzer Prizes, there was just one in 2012.

David Kocieniewski of The New York Times won in the explanatory reporting category for his “lucid series that penetrated a legal thicket to explain how the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporations often exploited loopholes and avoided taxes,” the judges wrote.

In addition, The Wall Street Journal staff was a finalist in the explanatory reporting category for its “tenacious exploration of how personal information is harvested from the cellphones and computers of unsuspecting Americans by corporations and public officials in a largely unmonitored realm of modern life.”

And in the national reporting category, there were two finalists that had business journalism overtones: Jeff Donn of the Associated Press for his “diligent exposure of federal regulators easing or neglecting to enforce safety standards as aging nuclear power plants exceed their original life spans,” with interactive data and videos used to drive home the findings; and Jessica Silver-Greenberg of The Journal for her “compelling examination of aggressive debt collectors whose often questionable tactics, profitable but largely unseen by the public, vexed borrowers hard hit by the nation’s financial crisis.”

Although there was no winner in editorial writing, Paula Dwyer and Mark Whitehouse of Bloomberg News were finalists in the category for their analysis of and prescription for the European debt crisis, “dealing with important technical questions in ways that the average readers could grasp.”

All of the finalists can be seen here.

Last year, there were four winners and five finalists of the Pulitzer Prizes that were forms of business journalism, from investigative pieces to commentary to editorial writing about business and economics news and issues.

It was the best showing for business journalism in the history of the awards. According to this list, there has never been more than one business journalism winner in one year. (There is no business journalism category.)

In 2010, there was one business journalism Pulitzer winner, the New York Times, in the national reporting category, and four finalists.