DFM’s Daily Breeze captures Pulitzer Prize for local coverage

Torrance newspaper, L. A. Times among journalism honorees

NEW YORK — The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for an examination of the deadly toll of domestic violence, while The New York Times collected three awards and the Los Angeles Times two.

The Daily Breeze of Torrance, a sister publication of this newspaper owned by Digital First Media, won the Pulitzer for local reporting for a series of stories exposing corruption and cronyism in a small, cash- strapped Southern California school district whose superintendent was ultimately fired.

The 70,000- circulation Daily Breeze’s award was shared by the reporting editing team of Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci.

The award marked the first Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which publishes the Daily Breeze and eight other L. A.-area dailies, including the Los Angeles Daily News.

“This is an achievement that our organization has never before done. It’s the highest award in journalism,” the group’s vice president and executive editor, Michael Anastasi, told cheering staffers in a brief video posted on the newspaper’s website.

The Breeze’s stories revealed, among other things, that the Centinela Valley High School District’s former superintendent had an annual compensation package in 2013 of $ 633,000 for presiding over just four schools.

That was nearly $ 250,000 more than the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s secondlargest, received.

The L. A. Times was the only other California newspaper to win Pulitzers on Monday, for feature writing and criticism. Fresno- based Times staff writer Diana Marcum was honored for her series examining the financial and emotional impact of California’s drought on farmers and others residing in the agriculturally rich Central Valley.

The Seattle Times staff took the breaking news award for its coverage of a mudslide that killed 43 people and its exploration of whether the disaster could have been prevented.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both won investigative reporting prizes, the Times for an examination of lobbyists’ influence on state attorneys general, the Journal for detailing fraud and waste in the Medicare payment system.

The Times’ coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa won for international reporting and feature photography, and the St. Louis Post- Dispatch was honored for breaking news photography for its images of the racial unrest touched off by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Washington Post took the national reporting prize for exposing security lapses that spurred an overhaul of the Secret Service.