Hahn has written extensively about the American South, African-American history and the international history of slavery, emancipation and race. Blau has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. 

The new entry system ends the submission of entries on paper, typically in the form of a scrapbook, a practice dating to the start of the Prizes 95 years ago.

During his time as managing editor, ProPublica became the first online news organization to win Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, it won the Investigative Reporting prize for chronicling the life-and-death decisions by a hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were isolated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. A year later, it won the National Reporting prize for exposing Wall Street practices that contributed to the nation’s economic meltdown.

Both have served on the board since 2004. They replace co-chairs Jim Amoss, editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans; Kathleen Carroll, executive editor and senior vice president of The Associated Press; and Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Board members serve a maximum of nine years while a chair serves for only one year. The new co-chairs will share responsibilities over the course of the year.

They are Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper correspondent and nonfiction author, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine; Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama; and Aminda (Mindy) Marqués Gonzalez, vice president and executive editor of The Miami Herald, which has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes in its history and was twice a Pulitzer finalist in recent years.

Daniszewski played a central role in AP’s opening of the first Western news and photo bureau in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2012, and the Yangon, Myanmar, bureau earlier in 2013 -- the first return to that country by a Western news agency after decades of strict military rule. He was part of a team that won an Overseas Press Club award in 2007 and that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist that year for coverage of Iraq’s descent into civil war.

An honors graduate of Indiana and Edinburgh Universities, Tash started with the St. Petersburg [Tampa Bay] Times in the fall of 1978 as a reporter covering local news. He went on to cover state government in Tallahassee and served as city editor, metropolitan editor, Washington bureau chief and, ultimately, editor of the Times.

"For a dozen years, Sig has been a devoted and wise steward of the Pulitzer Prizes and the machinery that produces them," said Paul Tash, chairman of the Pulitzer Board. "It is a little hard to imagine the Prizes without him."

Allen, the first African American woman to chair the Board, has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology and the history of political thought.

"Mike Pride is the ideal candidate to take the Pulitzer Prizes into their next phase. He is committed to a free press and community journalism as pillars of democracy. He is a warm person of sound judgment and inspiring creativity. His deep experience with the Prizes equips him brilliantly to help us navigate the new while also steering a course true to our original values."