Apr 20, 2015 2 min read

The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with a staff of 80 and a daily circulation of 85,000, won the most prestigious of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism Monday for a series on the high numbers of deaths resulting from domestic abuse in the state.

The series, entitled “Till Death Do Us Part,” was awarded the gold medal for public service that went, last year, to The Washington Post and The Guardian for their articles based on National Security Agency documents leaked by the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden. It is the first time in five years that the prize has gone to such a small newspaper.

The New York Times won the prize for investigative reporting for a series by Eric Lipton on aggressive efforts by lobbyists and lawyers to push state attorneys general to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators to benefit their clients. It shared the prize with The Wall Street Journal, which won its first Pulitzer in recent years for a project that revealed previously confidential data “on the motivations and practices of their health care providers.”

The Times won two other prizes. The photographer Daniel Berehulak was awarded for feature photography for a series of poignant portraits, shot across months, documenting Ebola’s deadly spread in West Africa. And the paper’s staff won for “courageous front-line reporting and vivid human stories on Ebola in Africa.”