The Seattle Times staff took the breaking news award for its coverage of a mudslide that killed 43 people and its exploration of whether the disaster could have been prevented.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both won investigative reporting prizes, the Times for an examination of lobbyists' influence on state attorneys general, the Journal for detailing fraud and waste in the Medicare payment system.
The Times' coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa won Pulitzers for international reporting and feature photography, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was honoured in the breaking news photography category for its images of the racial unrest touched off by the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The Pulitzer judges also recognised less widely known stories, such as the Post and Courier's exploration of 300 women's deaths in the past decade. The paper shed light on a legal system in which first-time offenders face at most 30 days in jail for a domestic violence beating but can get five years in prison for cruelty to a dog. Since the series was published, state lawmakers have proposed tougher penalties for domestic violence, and Governor Nikki Haley created a task force to investigate the problem.
The Pulitzers, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer and first given out in 1917, are American journalism's highest honour. The public service award consists of a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of US$10,000 ($13,088) each.
For the first time this year, many online and print magazines were eligible for the awards - in feature writing and investigative reporting only - but none of them won.
While the winners were largely drawn from old-media names, "the digital component of their work is becoming more and more sophisticated", prize administrator Mike Pride said. "Newspapers know where the future is and, in some cases, are doing really good jobs at it."
