The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism were announced Monday, and our very own East Bay Times won the coveted prize for Breaking News Reporting for their "relentless coverage of the 'Ghost Ship' fire, which killed 36 people at a warehouse party, and for reporting after the tragedy that exposed the city’s failure to take actions that might have prevented it."

The East Bay Times, composed largely of staffers from the former Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times, beat out other finalists The Dallas Morning News, for their coverage of last year's shooting spree that claimed the lives of five police officers, and The Orlando Sentinel for their coverage of the Pulse Nightclub shooting last June.

The Pulitzer committee highlighted ten pieces written by the East Bay Times staff between December 3, 2016 and December 11, 2016, including this early report on the fire's victims, and this portrait of Ghost Ship proprietor Derick Ion Almena published just two days after the deadly blaze.

Having covered the fire and reblogged the unfolding news myself last December, I can attest to how swift and thorough the East Bay Times' reporting was, which included work by Thomas Peele, Robert Salonga, David DeBolt, Rick Hurd, Julia Prodis Sulek, Matthias Gafni, Aaron Davis, Angela Hill, Erin Baldassari, Katy Murphy, and Tracy Seipel.

Other big prizes went to David A. Fahrenthold of The Washington Post for National Reporting, for his work "casting doubt on Donald Trump's assertions of generosity toward charities"; The New York Daily News and ProPublica "for uncovering, primarily through the work of reporter Sarah Ryley, widespread abuse of eviction rules by the police to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities"; and to the New York Times both for International Reporting and Feature Writing, for their "coverage of Vladimir Putin's efforts to project Russia's power abroad," and C.J. Chivers's feature story on a Marine's postwar descent into violence.