LA Times: "On the Media: An unlikely duo wins Pulitzer for Bell coverage"

By James Rainey

Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Vives, right, celebrates with fellow reporter Jeff Gottlieb after they won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times / Associated Press / April 18, 201

There were several great moments in the Los Angeles Times newsroom Monday, as the paper reeled in a couple of Pulitzer Prizes.

You had to love Ruben Vives, just three years into his reporting career, accepting a glass of champagne with a shaking hand, but speaking like a practiced orator about the value of newspapers. Who wasn't tickled for Barbara Davidson, the winner for feature photography, beaming and threatening to sing the anthem of her native Canada? Times Editor Russ Stanton drew a roar of approval paying tribute to Vives' journeyman reporting partner. "When you look up 'grizzled veteran' in the AP stylebook," Stanton said, "it says, 'See also Gottlieb, Jeff.'"

The story of corruption in the city of Bell couldn't have been led by a more perfectly cinematic duo, a pair of mismatched bookends, both raised in Los Angeles but from worlds apart. The story of Vives and Gottlieb's wildly divergent paths to the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, journalism's top award, ought to make even a business renowned for moving on pause for a moment of appreciation.

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