Yesterday, Columbia University announced the winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, letters, drama, and music—and among the distinguished few were online news organizations The Huffington Post and Politico, according to a Columbia press release.

The reputable Pulitzer Prizes, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in his will and administrated by Columbia University since 1917, are “perceived as a major incentive for high-quality journalism,” according to the website.

These are the first Pulitzer wins for both The Huffington Post and Politico. A complete list of winners is available on the Pulitzer website.

David Wood, senior military correspondent for The Huffington Post, received a prize for National Reporting for his “Beyond the Battlefield” series, which highlighted “the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war,” the release said.

As everyone from businesses to governments to individuals go digital, the amount of raw data being recorded and stored is growing at a dizzying rate. Often this data contains useful information that it is in the public interest to analyse, but it exists in a format that very few people can understand. The solution to the problem? Find experts who can convert large amounts of data into easily accessible stories. In other words, find data journalists.

These are some of the ideas fuelling Danish daily Dagbladet Information's new initiative, Nordisk Nyhedshacker 2012 ("Nordic News Hacker 2012"). The project, run in collaboration with The Guardian, Google and Syddansk Universitet's Center for Journalism, invites journalists or data experts to create a piece of data journalism - which could be anything from a data mash-up to a new mobile app - and submit it to a panel of judges. The creator of the winning entry will be given a $20,000 scholarship by Google and will be invited to work with the Guardian Data Blog in London for one month. The Center for Journalism contributes by advertising the competition and incorporating elements of data journalism into its curriculum.

The World Press Photo Contest announced on 10 February that a picture by Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda has been named as the World Press Photo of the Year 2011.

The photograph shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. Aranda was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times.

A posting on the The New York Times "Lens" blog by Kerri MacDonald and David Furst, notes that the photograph is one of the first Aranda filed from Yemen, and quotes him as saying: "I got back to my place, and I saw the photo in the screen and I was like 'Wow'. The woman is not just crying. It was something more. You can feel that the woman is really strong".

"The photo is the result of a very human moment", said Juror Manoocher Deghati, "but it also reminds us of something important, that women played a crucial part in this revolution. It is easy to portray the aggressiveness of situations like these. This image shows the tenderness that can exist within all the aggression. The violence is still there, but it shows another side".

2011 was hardly a vintage year for the Pulitzer Breaking News Prize - in fact, for the first time in the 95-year history of the prize, there was no winner. Even though the Pulitzers adapted their rules in 2010 to allow multimedia reporting to be entered for the prize, there were only 37 entries in the Breaking News category. Something clearly had to change.

This year the Pulitzer team have shaken things up, launching a digital-only entry service and altering the criteria for a breaking news award, "stressing real-time reporting of breaking events", according to the Pulitzer website.

Nieman Lab provides the new definition:

"For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news that, as quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage."