From staff reports

Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram Staff Writer Colin Woodard was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist Monday in the category of Explanatory Reporting.

The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting was awarded to ProPublica and The Marshall Project, which collaborated on a story that examined how law enforcement often fails to properly investigate rape cases and fails to comprehend the traumatic effects of rape on its victims.

Woodard was recognized for his reporting on “Mayday: Gulf of Maine in Distress,” a six-part series examining the impact of climate change on the Gulf of Maine.

Woodard’s series, which was published Oct. 25-30, 2015, provided readers with a compelling account of dramatic ecological changes occurring in the warming ocean region between Nova Scotia and Cape Cod.

“I’ve reported about climate change effects on the oceans since the early 1990s, and have always considered it one of the most important and consequential stories out there, but it often felt like relatively few people wanted to hear about it,” Woodard said in a statement. “This makes it especially gratifying to have a series on this topic receive this kind of recognition.”

Before joining the Press Herald in 2012, Woodard reported extensively on both climate change and the environmental problems facing the oceans as a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

His reporting assignments took him to Greenland, Antarctica, the Central Pacific and the seas of Europe, the Caribbean and East Asia.

Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project and T. Christian Miller of ProPublica won the Pulitzer in Explanatory Reporting for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” It is the first Pulitzer for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization with a staff of 25.

The Marshall Project was launched in November 2014. Its mission is to create and sustain a sense of urgency about the criminal justice system in the U.S. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

The other finalist in the Explanatory Reporting category was a team of reporters from The Wall Street Journal, which published a series of reports on how pharmaceutical companies employ secretive tactics to raise drug prices at great cost to patients and taxpayers.

Pulitzer Prize judges included writers and editors from The New York Times, the Des Moines Register, The Associated Press, The Oregonian, the Chicago Tribune, The Post and Courier, and The Telegraph.