NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize in the coveted public service category, while another Pennsylvania newspaper, The Patriot-News, took home the award for local reporting for its coverage of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal.

The Philadelphia Inquirer won for what for the board described as “its exploration of pervasive violence in the city’s schools,” beating out nominees The New York Times and the Miami Herald.

The New York Times was the only multiple winner, picking up prizes for international reporting and explanatory reporting in a year with a number of first time winners, including The Huffington Post.

And for the only time in more than three decades, the board declined to award winners in two categories, editorial writing and fiction. Finalists in fiction included Denis Johnson, Karen Russell and the late David Foster Wallace.

Among the notable winners, Alabama’s The Tuscaloosa News was awarded the prize for breaking news in its reporting around the devastating April tornado that struck its hometown.

“There’s a sense of accomplishment but with the recognition of the difficulties that continue for a lot of the community,” said Doug Ray, who was executive editor of the paper during the coverage. He recently became executive editor of the Gainesville Sun and Ocala Star-Banner in Florida.

“We came through with what we were supposed to do in those first hours,” Ray said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The bitter five-year battle over the estate of Brooke Astor, the socialite and philanthropist, was settled on Wednesday in a deal that allows $100 million to be dispensed to various charities, including New York parks, museums and schools.

The agreement ends a dispute over Astor’s fortune raging since her death in 2007 at age 105, one that brought to light ugly details about the high-society family and eventually resulted in the fraud conviction of Astor’s only son, Anthony Marshall.

The settlement, announced by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, sets aside $30 million to establish a new education fund that will make grants aimed at improving New York City education.

Other major beneficiaries include the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and funds that will funnel millions to Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and playgrounds around the city.

“Brooke Astor was at the center of New York philanthropy for nearly half a century,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “I am pleased that my office led the way to an agreement that honors Mrs. Astor’s final wishes and benefits New York’s landmark educational and cultural institutions.”

Astor family members, friends and former staffers will also receive their shares of the inheritance with the deal, which was based on a will dating from 2002. Among the issues in dispute is whether her 2002 will or another version should be used.

The deal was approved on Wednesday by the Westchester County Surrogate’s Court.

NEW YORK, March 16 (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs has no shortage of friends in high places - including New York’s City Hall.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made his early millions on Wall Street before turning them into billions at his own financial data and news company, threw his support behind the investment bank, still licking its wounds from a withering resignation letter by a Goldman Sachs employee in the New York Times.

Calling Goldman Sachs “a great firm,” Bloomberg used a morning radio talk show on Friday to accuse critics of unfairly “piling on” the bank and said the former staffer, Greg Smith, was wrong to air his views in the op-ed piece. His firm, Bloomberg LP, competes with Thomson Reuters.

“I thought (it was) a nasty letter from an employee,” said Bloomberg, who regards loyalty as non-negotiable.

It was the second successive day Bloomberg stood behind Goldman Sachs. He visited bank’s headquarters on Thursday to personally express his support to staffers.

“You know, you go to work for a company, it seems to me they have an obligation to never diss you. They can part company with you. But they should never do that,” said the mayor on The John Gambling Show radio show on WOR.

Smith, who worked in equity derivatives, said in the op-ed that Goldman had become “as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it” and was a place he no longer wished to work.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Less than two weeks ago anyone looking to buy a ticket to watch the New York Knicks play the Dallas Mavericks this weekend could expect to pay around $270. Today, the same ticket would cost about twice that.

Call it Linflation.

Jeremy Lin’s surprising basketball heroics have made the 23-year-old point guard a sports sensation and media darling nearly overnight, and there are no shortage of entrepreneurs trying to cash in.

Already, two men have attempted to trademark the catchphrase “Linsanity” – a favorite of headline writers and National Basketball Association fans – in hopes of having exclusive rights to plaster the word across T-shirts, hats and baby bibs. A third man has asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the rights to “Lin-sanity” and “Lin-credible.”

“Jeremy Lin needs to be careful and hire the right advisors and lawyers to protect his name,” said Marc Ganis, president of sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd. “There are people all over the planet who are looking to financially capitalize on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon.”

Lin, a Taiwanese-American whose roots make him marketable in Asia, graced both the front and back covers of the New York Post and Daily News on Wednesday, the day after hitting a game-winning, 3-point shot to propel the Knicks to their sixth straight win.

Even President Barack Obama has taken notice. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama watched highlights of the Knicks dramatic win over the Toronto Raptors and came away “very impressed” with Lin.

NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – One winner in 2012′s political races already has been decided: local television stations.

Spending on TV advertising likely will mount to historic levels as candidates again blanket airwaves with commercials pitching their virtues or bashing their opponents. The hard-fought, and expensive, battles will provide a welcome windfall for TV stations, particularly in the most tightly contested states that will decide if President Barack Obama wins re-election or loses to his yet-to-be-decided Republican opponent.

Forecasters are calling for spending on political advertisements to increase up to 30 percent this year compared with 2008, setting a new record and reflecting, in part, a response to the landmark “Citizens United” 2010 Supreme Court ruling, which ended most restrictions on donations by corporations and unions. This is the first presidential election since the ruling.

The decision fostered the creation of Super PACs, fundraising committees that can spend money to support a candidate but cannot officially coordinate with campaigns. Republican Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has raised at least $12.2 million, while Obama’s Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has raised at least $3.2 million, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website associated with the nonpartisan group Center for Responsive Politics.

Around 85 percent of the money that is raised and spent on advertising historically goes toward local broadcast TV. In 2012, that could total between $2.5 billion to $3.0 billion, said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

“Television advertising remains a message weapon of choice to most campaigns,” Goldstein said. “Every year is a record.”

Spending in 2012 should easily beat the mark of $2.4 billion in the 2010 mid-term elections, the first to include Super Pac money and a cycle that featured no presidential race on the ballot but saw gubernatorial and Senate contests in big, expensive states such as California, Texas and New York. By comparison, about $2.1 billion was spent on local broadcast TV commercials in 2008 — before the creation of the new rules governing Super Pacs.

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – The Daily News of New York has hired former News of the World editor Colin Myler as its editor in chief, an appointment that is certain to add spice to the newspaper’s long and heated rivalry with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Myler, who replaces Kevin Convey, had long been a close lieutenant of Murdoch, serving as managing editor of the New York Post before he was brought to London in 2007 to clean up the scandal-plagued News of the World.

The hiring of Myler, 59, means he will now be in direct competition with Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the New York Post and owned the News of the World until it closed this past summer.

Myler will start his job January 10.

“The New York Daily News is a great institution of American journalism which will only get better under the leadership of Colin,” publisher Mort Zuckerman said in a memo on Wednesday announcing the hiring.

The Daily News, the largest-circulation daily newspaper in New York, has been engaged in a long, expensive and often nasty competition with the New York Post. Myler served as executive editor and managing editor of the New York Post from 2001 to 2007.

“He was quite successful at the Post,” said British media commentator Steve Hewlett. “He knows the market very well. He’s won his spurs in that marketplace, and also of course he has no reason to thank Rupert Murdoch for anything now.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Times Co is nearing a sale of 16 regional newspapers spread across the Southeast and California to Halifax Media Holdings, it said on Monday.

The possible sale, news of which comes just days after New York Times Co announced the sudden retirement of its chief executive, is the latest in a series of steps the company has taken to cut costs and focus on its most important newspapers and their websites.

With a weekday circulation of about 430,000, the newspapers included in the Times Co’s regional media group are largely scattered across the U.S. Southeast and California. Among them are the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Ledger, Star-Banner, The Gainesville Sun and News Chief in Florida; Herald-Journal in South Carolina; and The Press Democrat in California.

The Boston Globe, which the Times Co had previously considered selling, is not among the papers that make up the regional media group and thus is not part of the proposed sale.

As a group, the regional papers have struggled recently because of weak local retail and national advertising, partly reflecting the broad struggles of the economy. In the first nine months of the year, the group had a combined revenue of $190 million, down about 6.7 percent from the prior year.

If the deal is completed, the papers, which have collectively won five Pulitzer Prizes, will become part of Halifax Media. That company owns The Daytona-Beach News Journal, among other papers and media businesses across the south.

The Times Co confirmed it was in talks to sell the newspapers after reports surfaced in the media, including JimRomenesko.com. The journalism website displayed a screenshot of the Halifax Media Group’s corporate website that pre-emptively showed it as the owner of the Times Co’s regional papers.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Janet Robinson, the outgoing chief executive of The New York Times Co, understood the dynamics of the print publishing business. But the newspaper business isn’t what it used to be.

Rather, publishing is now a complicated Venn diagram of digital advertising, online subscriptions, and video, all designed to offset the declining fundamentals of print.

In this new world, Robinson’s results were mixed.

For instance, in 2005, the year after being named CEO, Robinson signed off on the roughly $400 million acquisition of About.com, a website that relies on user-generated expert content to surface high in search results. But About.com has struggled of late as a result of competition from Demand Media and others, as well as changes made by Google to its search algorithm. As a result, About’s revenue plummeted almost 21 percent in the third quarter due to declines in cost-per-click and display advertising.

The About Group was largely responsible for the Times Co’s 4.5 percent decline in overall digital revenue in the third quarter.

Moreover, the Times Co’s first attempt at a paid digital model under its own banner, a service called Times Select that asked readers to pay for access to its opinion columnists, failed. Executives learned from the mistakes of that experiment, however, and the subsequent meter-modeled pay wall instituted at the flagship New York Times, which grants readers access to 20 articles per month for free before requiring them to pay for additional content, is so far considered a success.

Still, even that has its critics, who complain that the model is too pricey and that the company is, as Morningstar analyst Joscelyn MacKay put it, “pricing in assumptions that are way too lofty.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Janet Robinson will step down as chief executive of the New York Times Co at the end of the month after a seven-year run in which she attempted to steer the company through one of the harshest business environments it has ever faced.

The New York Times, which in addition to its flagship paper publishes The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, among others, will begin a search for internal and external candidates to replace Robinson, 61. Until then, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. will oversee the company.

News of Robinson’s departure coincides with the retirement of Martin Nisenholtz, the company’s longtime digital leader, at the end of the year, meaning the Times Co will start 2012 without a CEO or digital boss.

The Times Co gave no explanation for Robinson’s sudden departure, which caught analysts as well as company insiders by surprise. Speculation among industry observers and the analyst community centered on the company’s faltering stock price, which has declined more than 80 percent since Robinson was appointed CEO in December 2004. This year alone, shares are down nearly 25 percent, a performance that has frustrated investors.

Times Co shares, which had traded in the mid-$30s during one point in Robinson’s tenure, closed trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange up 1.8 percent, or 13 cents, to $7.53.

“It is very unusual to have a long-time CEO suddenly announce her leaving within two weeks with no replacement,” said Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur. “She’s done a lot of good things but at the end of the day the stock price is the ultimate measure of success.”

In a recent interview, Robinson said she considered it a “mandate to increase shareholder value,” but argued she had done so through building a “multiplatform company” even during a period of “economic uncertainty and secular pressures.”