The Tuscaloosa News won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage for its coverage of the April 27 tornado.

City editor Katherine Lee said she was proud of the job the newsroom did on April 27.

“I think we felt an added responsibility to do our jobs carefully and thoroughly because we were covering a city we all know and love, and we knew we wanted to get it right, as well as [get] it first,” Lee said.

Reporters and photographers were some of the first onto the scene following the tornado. Despite not having power in the newsroom for more than two days, they utilized social media to report to locals.

“The tornado really clarified for us the role of social media in journalism,” Lee said. “The Pulitzer for breaking news is awarded to a publication that uses all forms of newsgathering and dissemination to report in real time, including online resources, and while we were learning along the way, the news staff really made use of everything we had at our disposal.

“In fact, in the first few hours after the tornado, they were all the resources we had. Our power was down, we only had a handful of computers running, landlines were down and cell phone calls weren’t going through. We turned to Twitter, Facebook and the website to get information back to the newsroom and out into the community at a time people really needed information as fast and accurately as possible.”

The win is the second for the newspaper, which won its first award in 1957 for an editorial written by Buford Boone. The Pulitzer includes $10,000 in prize money.

“As journalists, we’ve prepared our entire careers for work like this, and we were glad we could play a role in helping our community in a time of great need,” Lee said. “That it’s been recognized by the Pulitzer committee is very gratifying.”