Panama Papers, WSJ’s Peggy Noonan win Pulitzer Prize

The Panama Papers stories have won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

The stories were written by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy, The Miami Herald and more than 100 other media partners.

Journalists from nearly 80 countries speaking dozens of languages joined forces to delve into 11.5 million files, 214,000 offshore entities and almost 40 years of records, collectively known as “The Panama Papers.” The trove of leaked documents came from a Panama-headquartered law firm that establishes offshore accounts for its clients.

It exposed offshore hideaways tied to mega-banks, corporate bribery scandals, drug kingpins, arms traffickers and a network of people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin that shuffled as much as $2 billion around the world.

In addition, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. The judges wrote that her work rose “to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”

Renee Dudley, Steve Stecklow and Alexandra Harney of Reuters were finalists in the national reporting category for uncovering a U.S. college admissions process corrupted by systematic cheating on standardized tests in Asia and the complicity of American officials eager to cash in on full-tuition foreign students.

The Journal was a finalist in international reporting for clear and persistent coverage that shaped the world’s understanding of dramatic events in Turkey as that nation careened from a promising democracy to a near-autocracy.

Adam Entous and Devlin Barrett of The Journal were finalists in the feature writing category for The Last Diplomat,” a multilayered thriller that took readers inside the rarely seen intersection of diplomacy and national security, telling the story of one woman’s professional ruin after years of service to her country.