The Washington Post has won four Pulitzer Prizes for its work in 2009, and three were awarded to The New York Times, of which the International Herald Tribune is the global edition. The prizes, which are administered by Columbia University in New York, were announced Monday.

ProPublica became the first of a new breed of online, nonprofit news organizations to win a Pulitzer, the most prestigious award in U.S. print journalism. At The New York Times, Michael Moss won in the explanatory category, for an investigation of the dangers of contaminated meat and porous government enforcement of food safety in the United States; and Matt Richtel won for the series ‘‘Driven to Distraction,’’ about the potentially fatal threat posed by drivers who indulge in texting and other electronic distractions.

Sheri Fink won in the investigative category, in a joint project for ProPublica and TheNewYork Times, for her detailed reconstruction of what has been described as euthanasia by doctors at a New Orleans hospital after they were stranded by Hurricane Katrina. Dr.

Fink, who is a medical doctor and also has a Ph.D., is a staff writer for ProPublica, and the articlewas published in The NewYork Times Magazine.

Dr. Fink’s award is a landmark for ProPublica and other digital news outlets.

Over the past few years, the Pulitzer Prize Board has relaxed eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online.

At The Washington Post, Kathleen Parker, a political columnist, won the award for commentary; Sarah Kaufmanwon for criticism, for her writing on dance; a Washington Post magazine article by Gene Weingarten about parents who cause the death of their children by leaving them in sweltering cars won the prize for feature writing; and Anthony Shadid, a longtime Iraq correspondent, won for international reporting.

Mr. Shadid, who now works for The New York Times, also won for his Iraq coverage in 2004. Mr. Weingarten’s prize is also his second.

The Bristol Herald Courier of southwestern Virginia, which has a circulation of 29,000, won the coveted prize for public service for work by Daniel Gilbert revealing that many energy companies failed to pay royalties on drilling for natural gas and that the royalties that were paid were not reaching the local people who deserved them.

In the arts, Paul Harding won the fiction prize for his novel ‘‘Tinkers,’’ while the drama award went to the musical ‘‘Next to Normal,’’ with music by Tom Kitt and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey.

Liaquat Ahamed won the history award for ‘‘Lords of Finance: The BankersWho Broke the World’’; the biography prize went to T. J. Stiles for ‘‘The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt’’; and the general nonfiction prize went to David E. Hoffman, an editor at The Post, for ‘‘The Dead Hand: TheUntold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.’’ Jennifer Higdon won the music prize for her Violin Concerto, and the Pulitzer board voted a special, posthumous citation to the singer-songwriter Hank Williams.

The poetryawardwent to Rae Armantrout for ‘‘Versed.’’ Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of The Philadelphia Daily News won an investigative reporting prize for exposing a rogue police narcotics squad.

Raquel Rutledge ofThe Milwaukee Journal Sentinelwon the local reporting prize for exposing fraud in Wisconsin’s child care subsidy program. Coverage of the shooting deaths of four police officers won the breaking news award for the staff of The Seattle Times.

Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register in Iowa won the breaking news photography award for her photograph of ‘‘the heart-stopping moment when a rescuer dangling in a makeshift harness tries to save a woman trapped in the foaming water beneath a dam,’’ while the feature photography prize went to Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post for his portraits of a teenage recruit in the U.S. Army through enlistment, training and deployment in Iraq.

Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie of The Dallas Morning News shared the award for editorial writing. Mark Fiore won the editorial cartooning award for his animated work, which appears on SFGate.com, the first purely online entry ever to win a Pulitzer.