Los Angeles Times Media Writers and Writing

LA Times 2008 Pulitzer Picks and Other Worthy Winners

damon-winter.jpg

LA Times reporters Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart won a well-deserved Pulitzer
for their excellent series The Big Burn about the cost and growth of California wildfires.

Also nominated as finalist in this category was Adam Liptak of The New York Times for his “lucid exposition of how the cornerstones of the American judicial system differ from those in other democratic nations, awakening readers to the benefits and drawbacks of those differences.”

Boxall and Cart were the right choice for the prize for taking an important
and inside-baseball-ish subject and making it readily understandable to the rest of us.

Yet I’m glad Liptak’s work was also recognized. I link to him often, including for this Pulitzer-nominated series.

Another interesting win was the St. Petersburg Times staff
in the national reporting category. The St. Pete folks won for “PolitiFact,” its don’t-lie-to-us fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that “used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voter.” Great stuff, that they are continuing now.

Here’s the link to the rest of the winners—where you’ll find lots of worthy work to peruse and appreciate—like the divine W. S. Merwin for poetry, and for drama “Ruined,” by Lynn Nottage—for a simply amazing and surprisingly redemptive play about wartime rape and brutality, set in the Congo.

(The photo above is from the Pulitzer-winning collection by the New York Times’ Damon Winter.)

2 Comments

  • Regarding Liptak, you liberals will never get it. I don’t care how other nations do whatever it is that they do. We need to do what is best for us given our situation.

    – – –

    The St. Petersburg Times is a far-left newspaper run by editors pushing their agenda.

    – – –

    The Pulitzer Prize is an American award for predominantly liberal journalism. …The awards are administered by Columbia University…”

    The current board includes:

    Bollinger, Lee C., president, Columbia University, New York, NY

    Carroll, Kathleen, executive editor and senior vice president, Associated Press

    Friedman, Thomas L., columnist, The New York Times, New York, NY

    Gissler, Sig, administrator, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, NY

    Gyllenhaal, Anders, executive editor, The Miami Herald, Miami, FL

    Harris, Jay T., Wallis Annenberg Chair, Director, Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

    Kennedy, David M., Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

    Lemann, Nicholas, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, NY

    Oppel, Richard, former editor, Austin American-Statesman, Austin, TX

    Tash, Paul C., editor, The St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, FL

    Well, I suppose that’s representative of American perpectives. (Jay Harris has to be far left coming from that program.)

  • More spew from the Hate-America Right’s descent into madness:

    “The St. Petersburg Times is a far-left newspaper…”

Leave a Comment