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Jose Antonio Vargas, a 27-year-old Filipino-American, was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on an astonishing shooting
spree in the United States, media reports said on Tuesday.
Vargas wrote two stories on America’s
deadliest shooting incident, Philippine cable news network ABS-CBN
News Channel reported. The Washington Post packaged those two
articles with seven others as their entry in the Pulitzer Prize.
A journalist for the past 10 years, Vargas, is a
reporter for the Washington Post, which won six Pulitzer awards this
year, including best breaking news reporting for its coverage of the
April 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre, where South Korean student Cho
Seung Hui killed 32 people before committing suicide.
“I was lucky enough to get an interview with
one of the eyewitnesses,” Vargas recounted.
“I found this eyewitness on Facebook [an
online directory that connects people through social networks at
colleges]. I got him on the phone, we talked for 25 minutes on the
phone and he was the only eyewitness we had for the story, so he was
a critical part of it,” he said.
His second story revolved around how Virginia
Tech students used the Internet to break through the cloud of
confusion and console each other in the wake of the unprecedented
campus carnage.
“Most of the students were connecting online
through Facebook, websites to basically connect with each other. It
was part of the healing process, but also to know what was going on
because everything was chaotic,” he said.
Besides Vargas, there have been at least four
Filipinos and Fil-Americans that won the Pulitzer Prize, according
to the report since 1941.
Vargas is now covering the political campaign,
running up to the November presidential elections.
“I specialize in the marriage of the Internet
and politics, how all the candidates are campaigning online. Barack
Obama has [generated] a tremendous amount of money on the
Internet,” he said.
-- Xinhua
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