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Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced (Washington Post)
Fourteen winners of journalism's most prestigious annual prize were named by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. SFGate The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism Monday for revealing the New York Police Department's widespread spying on Muslims, while the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., and 24-year-old reporter Sara Ganim captured the award for local reporting for breaking the Penn State scandal that ultimately brought down Joe Paterno. HuffPost For eight months this past year, Huffington Post senior military correspondent David Wood reported extensively on the lives of severely wounded veterans and their families in "Beyond the Battlefield," a 10-part series awarded Monday with the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. NYT / Lens Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize on Monday afternoon for "Welcome Home: The Story of Scott Ostrom," which won in the feature category. And Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse won the 2012 prize for breaking news photography for his coverage of a bloody attack in Afghanistan -- his third major award for the image. Yahoo! News / The Cutline The Tuscaloosa News won a Pulitzer for its coverage of 2011's deadly tornado -- including the paper's use of "social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 50 miles away." Philadelphia Inquirer The Inquirer's investigation of a climate of pervasive violence in Philadelphia's public schools won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday. Fishbowl LA It's a remarkable achievement for any journalist or newspaper organization to be named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. So congratulations are in order to the LA Times, despite the fact that the newspaper has just come up short in three separate 2011-year categories. GalleyCat There was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded this year. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace were all nominated. The Pulitzer Prizes A complete list of Pulitzer Prizewinners.

GMA Appears To Nudge Today From Top Spot After 16 Years (NYT / Media Decoder)
ABC's Good Morning America appears to have prevailed over NBC's Today show in weekly viewership for the first time in more than 16 years. TVNewser On Friday, GMA had a 333,000 total viewer lead on Today, enough to put it over the top for the week winning by just 13,000 viewers. NY Daily News GMA hasn't finished in first place in the morning since December 1995. LA Times GMA has been nipping at Today's heels for years. It's pulled even now because of a combination of factors, including the decline of NBC's prime-time lineup, which has made it more difficult to promote the morning show to a broad audience; instability in Today's hosting lineup (last year Ann Curry took over for Meredith Vieira), and the clever use of stunts. Mail Online NBC noted that Today still won by 254,000 viewers among 25- to 54-year-olds, the group that its ad sales are based upon. In that demographic, the Today show has won for 884 consecutive weeks.

Gannett 1Q Net Falls 25 Percent On Restructuring Costs (WSJ)
Gannett Co.'s first-quarter earnings fell 25 percent due to restructuring costs and an ongoing slide in print advertising revenue, two months after the publisher of USA Today launched new efforts to focus more on growing its digital operations. NYT / AP The company, which owns 82 newspapers in the United States, including USA Today; 23 broadcast television stations; and several digital media properties, said it earned $68.2 million, or 28 cents a share, in the quarter, down from $90.5 million, or 37 cents a share, a year earlier. Bloomberg Sales in the publishing division, the largest unit, decreased 6 percent during the most recent period as advertising and circulation fell, the company said. NY Post USA Today saw national advertising drop 13.3 percent -- led by a 14.2 percent decline in real estate advertising. TVSpy Gannett Monday reported earnings figures for the first quarter of 2012 that included $170.9 million in television revenues, a 7.9 percent increase compared to the first quarter of last year.

Truth Or Consequences (Texas Monthly)
Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman's finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting -- and that of every other journalist on the case. The Atlantic Wire The former CBS News anchor is "optimistic that somebody, somewhere will one day come forward and reveal the truth" about the so-called Killian documents, which were used to underpin his 2004 story claiming that Bush received special treatment to avoid the Vietnam draft and dodged his responsibilities.

Foursquare Confirms 20M Users, 2 Billion Check-Ins, On 4sqDay 2012 (VentureBeat)
Monday, the third annual 4sqDay (April 16, four-squared, get it?), check-in king Foursquare confirmed that it has reached new milestones of 20 million users and a whopping 2 billion check-ins. CNET Foursquare's growth appears to be accelerating. Back in June, the company announced that it had reached 10 million users after two years. SocialTimes At the end of February, Foursquare had 15 million registered users who had checked in 1.5 billion times at places like restaurants, museums, and parks. The company integrated with Facebook's Timeline on March 16, which might have helped grow its user base and made the check-ins easier to share.

Kim Roberts Hedgpeth Steps Down As SAG-AFTRA Co-National Executive Director (TheWrap.com)
Kim Roberts Hedgpeth will step down as SAG-AFTRA's co-national executive director at the end of April. Her departure will leave David White as the sole national executive director of the recently merged unions. LA Times / Company Town Hedgpeth, who will leave her post April 30, has served as AFTRA's national executive director since 2005.

Facebook Advertising Rates Skyrocket (AllFacebook)
Rising demand for advertising has enabled Facebook to raise prices 41 percent over a one-year period, for promotions sold based on the number of views or hits.

FCC Chief Urges Access On Pols' Ad Buys (Variety)
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski on Monday defended a plan to require stations to post information about candidates' political ad buys online, saying that some of the critics are taking a stand "against technology, against transparency and against journalism."

NBC Owned Stations, Comcast Sports Group Strike Ad Sales Partnership (B&C)
NBC Owned Television Stations and Comcast Sports Group have struck a new national advertising sales partnership in which NBC Owned Television Stations group will sell national advertising for four Comcast SportsNets (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Northwest and Philadelphia).

U.S. Consumers Receptive To Social Media Appearing On Their TV Screens (MarketWatch)
Social media is showing signs of connecting with TV viewers as nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of U.S. consumers surveyed recall seeing social media symbols such as Facebook "Likes" while watching television, according to an Accenture study. Moreover, one in three viewers (33 percent) have interacted with social media after seeing a social media symbol on their TV screen. TechCrunch The most common action for those who did interact with a show or ad while watching TV was liking its page on Facebook (20 percent). About 7 percent of viewers searched for a show's hashtag on Twitter and 5 percent used Shazam while sitting on their couch.

John Stossel Apologizes For ABC News Comments (TVNewser)
Fox Business Network anchor John Stossel has walked back comments he made last week in a conversation with the Heritage Foundation. Stossel said that he left ABC News "because it sucked there," adding that he felt ostracized because of his libertarian views.

Tablets Are Clear Go-To Alternative To TV (Multichannel News)
Tablets have quickly become the preferred second-screen alternative to TVs for viewing full-length episodes -- ahead of computers -- with tablet owners reporting that 15 percent of their TV show viewing happens on the devices, according to a new study commissioned by Viacom.

Bonnier SVP Gregg Hano Named CEO Of Mag+ (Adweek)
Gregg Hano, currently the senior vice president of corporate sales and the technology group at Bonnier Corp. (which includes Popular Science, Popular Photography, American Photo and Sound + Vision magazines), was named CEO of smartphone and tablet publishing platform Mag+, which started as a division within Bonnier and was spun off as a separate company within corporate parent Bonnier AB last year.

Three Reporters Departing WINK In Fort Myers (TVSpy)
Melissa Yeager, Erin Maloney and Lauren Pastrana are leaving WINK, the CBS affiliate in Fort Myers, Fla.

Adobe Study Shows High Online Ad Engagement (B&C)
New research from Adobe that was based on some 2.5 billion video ad impressions offers up some good news for companies looking to boost revenue from their online and mobile distribution content.