I draw some satisfaction that at least two California newspapers were among the Pulitzer Prize winners announced yesterday. Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart from the Los Angeles Times won the explanatory journalism award for an outstanding series on the wild fires that ravaged Southern California last year. Steven Breen from the San Diego Union Tribune won the award for editorial cartooning.
The LA Times’s success doesn’t rival to the newspaper’s triumph in 2004 when it snagged a remarkable five Pulitzers.
But the fact that it was able to win a prize even as it struggled through an extremely difficult year financially and in almost every other way underscores not only the importance of the Times — but its ongoing capacity to do world class journalism, despite having a newsroom with less than half the staff it had a half dozen years ago.
The Los Angeles Times is under bankruptcy protection filed by its owners, the Tribune Company. For the San Diego UnionTribune, 2008 was one of the most difficult in its history, when it was put for sale by the Copley family, which owned the paper for 80 years. (Earlier this year, it found a buyer — Platinum Equity, an equity firm .)
This year the New York Times equalled the LA Times feat of five years ago by winning five prizes. Here’s hoping that California will once again become a dominant force in national and international journalism.
In the meantime, all the winners deserve extra credit for doing great work during a time of such crisis, and diminishing resources, in the newspaper world.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
