As I noted here a few weeks ago, the New York University journalism program had done an intense investigation into ranking the top 10 journalism projects of the past decade.

The New York Times' “A Nation Challenged,” which already won a Pulitzer Prize back in 2002 for meticulously detailing the lives of those who perished in that terrible terrorist attack, took the first place prize.

“A special section published regularly after the September 11 attacks provided extraordinarily detailed and searching local, national and international reporting on the attacks and their consequences, along with moving profiles of a large number of the victims,” the judges wrote.

Others ranked in the top 10 ranged from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, 2003 to Barbara Ehrenreich's well-researched book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 2001.

In all, half of the top 10 projects came from newspapers, including The Times-Picayune of New Orleans on the Hurriance Katrina aftemath and The Boston Globe's reporting on the Catholic church sex scandal.