Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, May 13. I’m Robert J. Lopez, writing from Los Angeles.
The stellar journalism of the Los Angeles Times was honored this week when my colleague Marcus Yam won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for his powerful and moving images of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban last summer. The Times was also named a finalist in the breaking news category for its coverage of the accidental shooting death of a cinematographer on the set of the low-budget western “Rust.”
Yam’s award was the 49th Pulitzer Prize for The Times since 1942, including six gold medals for public service, which is journalism’s highest calling.
When the Pulitzers were announced Monday, I thought of the 1984 gold medal series produced by a team of Latino journalists, editors and photographers at The Times. It was a groundbreaking series of articles. The stories defied simplistic storylines and stereotypes that were often in reports about Mexican American and emerging Central American communities in Southern California. The series was published in digital form in 2020.
For me, the series underscores the value of having a newsroom that reflects the diversity of the communities it covers and the importance of giving back to the community. Two of the editors who led the landmark project, Frank Sotomayor and George Ramos, were my mentors and friends. Ramos died in 2011, and Sotomayor has been retired from The Times for a number of years.
Sotomayor wrote a book about the series and the 17 journalists who collaborated on the project. He was a pioneer who helped found organizations such as the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, both of which helped open the door for a generation of reporters like me. He and I still keep in touch, and during my time in the news business, I’ve tried to help younger reporters in the same way that Ramos, Sotomayor and others helped me.
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