And the Pulitzer goes to ....

The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's top honor, were announced yesterday. A full list is here, with links to the winning entries. And you might notice something, too:

Say what?

There was plenty of shock about this.

This isn't the first time this has happened. No award was given in this category back in 2004.

Many theories, but I think it comes down to how subjective good feature writing is. Other categories don't rely so heavily on just a good story -- remember the laws of importance and the laws of interesting? Well, feature writing basically rests on "law of interesting" alone, while the others all benefit from having some kind of importance attached to them. And folks can more readily agree on what's important rather than interesting. NSA secrets? Important. Abuses by big corporations? Important.

Supporting this idea is that the Pulitzer for fiction (yes, they do arts and letters, too) has not gone to any work seven times over the years. And again, fiction is a pretty subjective field.