L.A. Times wins Pulitzer Prize
Series exposed high salaries drawn by Bell, Calif. officials
NEW YORK – The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for revealing that politicians in a small, working-class California city were paying themselves exorbitant salaries. But for the first time in the Pulitzers’ 95-year history, no award was given in the category of breaking news – the bread and butter of daily journalism.
In a year when the big stories included the devastating earthquake in Haiti and the Gulf oil spill, the Pulitzer Board didn’t like the entries in the breaking news category enough to honor any of them with the most prestigious award in journalism.
The Los Angeles Times won for its series revealing that politicians in Bell, Calif., were drawing salaries well into six figures. The newspaper’s reporting that officials in the struggling city of 37,000 people were raising property taxes and other fees in part to cover the huge salaries led to arrests and the ouster of some of Bell’s top officials.
The Times won a second Pulitzer for feature photography, and the New York Times was awarded two Pulitzers for international reporting and for commentary.
“The real victors in this are the people of Bell, who were able to get rid of, there’s no other way to say it, an oppressive regime,” said reporter Jeff Gottlieb, clutching a bottle of champagne before about 100 people in the newsroom.
The board named three finalists for the breaking-news award: the Chicago Tribune for coverage of the deaths of two Chicago firefighters; the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald for reporting on the Haiti earthquake; and The Tennessean in Nashville, Tenn., for coverage of a devastating flood.
“No entry received the necessary majority,” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes. He wouldn’t elaborate except to say that the breaking-news award is given for covering local stories – stories in your own backyard, not somewhere else in the world – and it recognizes “speed and accuracy of initial coverage.”
In other journalism awards, the nonprofit ProPublica won its first outright Pulitzer for national reporting. Reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein were cited for exposing questionable Wall Street practices that contributed to the economic meltdown. The judges cited their use of digital media to help explain the complex subject.
ProPublica is a 3-year-old organization bankrolled by charitable foundations and staffed by distinguished veteran journalists. It pursues the kind of big investigative projects that many newspapers can no longer afford, and it offers many of its stories to traditional news organizations.