First time in 95 yrs,no breaking news Pulitzer

The Los Angeles Times won for its series revealing that politicians in Bell,California,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 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. Ruben Vives,another staff writer on the story,said,“At a time when people are saying newspapers are dying,I think this is the day when we can say,no,not really. We gave a small town,we gave them an opportunity to speak out. That’s what newspapers do.”

The Los Angeles Times has been hobbled by the troubles of its owner,Tribune Co,which has been operating under federal bankruptcy protection for the past two years.

Siddhartha Mukherjee wins award for work on cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee has become the fourth person of Indian origin to bag the prestigious Pulitzer Prize,the first being Gobind Behari Lal way back in 1937.

Mukherjee is a cancer physician. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Centre.

His award-winning non-fiction work The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer was described by the jury as “an elegant inquiry,at once clinical and personal,into the long history of an insidious disease that,despite treatment breakthroughs,still bedevils medical science”.

Lal was awarded the Pulitzer in the Reporting category for his coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University. Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for fiction for her collection of stories Interpreters of Maladies. Journalist-writer of Indian origin Geeta Anand was the next to get the award for her work on corporate scandals in America.pti