NEW YORK (AP) – Tom Masland, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent decades covering Haiti, Africa and the Middle East, died in Manhattan Thursday of injuries suffered in an auto accident. He was 55.

Masland was a contributing senior editor for Newsweek.com, where he began work last month after 15 years reporting for Newsweek about topics including Haiti, southern and central Africa and terrorism in the Middle East.

Masland was awarded a Pulitzer along with other staff at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1980 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster. He worked for the Inquirer for 11 years until 1986. His assignments included time as the newspaper’s Middle East correspondent in Beirut.

As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1986 to 1990, Masland covered famine in Ethiopia, a massacre in Burundi in 1988 and the Persian Gulf War.

He joined Newsweek in 1990, became a senior writer four years later for the international section and was named Africa regional editor and South Africa bureau chief in 1999.

In 1994, he shared the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award for a 1993 Newsweek cover story on slavery. He was injured by flying shrapnel from an explosion while covering an uprising in Liberia in 2003.

Masland, of Englewood, N.J., was on his way to play saxophone at a club Monday when a sport utility vehicle struck him as he crossed the street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, authorities said.

He is survived by his wife, Gina, three sons, his mother and three siblings.

“As anyone who has worked with him knows, Tom was a very kind and honorable man in addition to a valued and courageous reporter,” Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said. “He was always there for his colleagues in times of need.”

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