Monday April 18, 206

The winners of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced this afternoon. It's the centennial year for the awards, which were created by the estate of Joseph Pulitzer to honor achievement in journalism and the arts.. Pulitzer, a native of Hungary, was paid by a recruiter to come to the U.S. and join the Union Army during the Civil War.

After the war, he acquired and merged two newspapers in St. Louis to form the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1883, he bought The New York World, which gained a reputation as a champion of public-service journalism. He changed American journalism by introducing comics, illustrations and coverage of sports and women's fashion.

But Pulitzer also engaged in the kind of sensationalism that led to the term "yellow journalism," a phrase inspired by the "Yellow Kid" comic strip that appeared in both Pulitzer's newspaper and that of its chief rival, William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal. In one newspaper promotion, Pulitzer crowdfunded the money needed for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty by offering to print on the front page the name of every person who donated to its construction. You may hear his name pronounced as PEW-litzer today. Pulitzer said his name as PULL-it-sir, and that's what the Pulitzer Board follows.

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