Ellington

NEW YORK (AP) — The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's highest honor, will be announced Monday.

Among the potential contenders are reporters who revealed the massive U.S. government surveillance effort. The revelations, based on thousands of documents handed over by leaker Edward Snowden, were first published in June in The Guardian and The Washington Post, which last week received a George Polk Award for national security reporting.

The disclosures showed that the National Security Agency has collected information about millions of Americans' phone calls and emails based on its classified interpretations of laws passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The disclosures have led to proposed overhauls of some U.S. surveillance programs, including changes in the way the government spies on foreign allies.

Other reporters who are potential Pulitzer contenders include Andrea Elliott of The New York Times, who won a Polk Award for local reporting for her five-part series "Invisible Child" focusing on Dasani Coates, one of 22,000 homeless children in New York City.

Another contender is John Cichowski of The Record on Woodland Park, N.J., who helped break open the Gov. Chris Christie bridge scandal by being the first to write about the traffic jams stemming from the closures of lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge.

The Pulitzers are given out each year by Columbia University on the recommendation of a board of journalists and others.