PULITZER AWARD-WINNING JOURNALISM

Awarded to Diana Marcum of the Los Angeles Times for her dispatches from California’s Central Valley offering nuanced portraits of lives affected by the state’s drought, bringing an original and empathic perspective to the story.

Awarded to Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times for savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider’s view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.

In bestowing the gold medal for public service, the Pulitzer judges said they were honoring The Times’ “exposure of corruption in the small California city of Bell where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, resulting in arrests and reforms.”
Reporting by Jeff Gottlieb, Ruben Vives and other Times staff writers led to criminal charges against former Bell City Administrator Robert Rizzo, who, with his $800,000 salary, became the face of the scandal. Rizzo and seven other former city officials were charged with multiple felonies and have been ordered to stand trial.
The Times’ stories sparked legislative reform efforts aimed at public pay and pension abuses, including a bill that would require California’s city, county and schools officials to disclose their compensation online.

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Former Bell city manager Robert Rizzo is arrested at his Huntington Beach home on Sept. 21, 2010. (Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times

Times photographer Barbara Davidson spent nearly two years in fiercely private and insular communities such as South Los Angeles, Compton and Watts to chronicle the aftermath of gang violence. In the beginning, Davidson didn’t take her cameras out of her car for days at a time. Eventually, she became part of the community.
The Pulitzer judges honored Davidson for photos that told an “intimate story of innocent victims trapped in the city’s crossfire of deadly gang violence.”

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The Sun Sentinel was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service journalism for its investigation of off-duty police officers endangering the lives of citizens by speeding.

The newspaper launched its three-month investigation after an off-duty Miami police officer was pulled over by a Florida state trooper for driving 120 mph in the fall of 2011. The resulting series, Above the Law: Speeding Cops, broke new ground in database journalism and had an immediate and lasting impact on the community.

The three-part series was published in February 2012, revealing the shocking behavior of law enforcement officers behind the wheel. As a direct result of the Sun Sentinel’s investigation, cities throughout South Florida instituted new ways of tracking their police activity as a result of the series. The database was so innovative that two law enforcement agencies sent investigators to the newsroom to learn how to replicate it.

Read more at sunsentinel.com

Pulitzer judges recognized Mary Schmich “for her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city.”

When Pulitzer winners were announced shortly after 2 p.m. CDT Schmich was out of the Tribune newsroom. But she appeared several minutes later and was met by loud and sustained applause from her colleagues.

“I feel so very lucky to have done this work for so long at this place,” Schmich said. “We are all very lucky.”

Read more at chicagotribune.com

Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune
2012 Pulitzer Prize, Commentary

Above: Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger presents Diana K. Sugg with the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting. Photo: Pulitzer.org

Diana K. Sugg, a medical reporter for The Sun, received the Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting for a series of articles ranging from stillbirths to sepsis to the controversial practice of hospitals allowing families to comfort loved ones in emergency rooms.

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Above: Columbia University President George Rupp (right) presents John C. Bersia with The 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Photo: Pulitzer.org

For distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction, Five thousand dollars ($5,000).

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Above: Columbia University Provost Jonathan R. Cole (right) presents Brian Toolan, of the Hartford Courant, with the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. Photo: Pulitzer.org

Awarded to The Hartford Courant Staff for its clear and detailed coverage of a troubled gunman’s deadly rampage at Connecticut Lottery headquarters. The Courant won the Pulitzer in the breaking news category, which honors early coverage of a local event.

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The Courant was awarded its first Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on how a flawed mirror was built by scientists at Connecticut’s Perkin-Elmer Corp. and how that mirror crippled the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope. The winning reporters were Robert S. Capers and Eric Lipton who worked five months reconstructing the story of the Hubble debacle.

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