How Berzon won the Pulitzer

Marshall Allen of the Las Vegas Sun writes Tuesday about how a reporter for the newspaper, Alexandra Berzon, won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the high rate of construction deaths on the Strip that led to reforms.

Allen writes, “When Berzon was interviewed for a job at the Sun in late 2007, Heikes mentioned that she might be assigned to look into what seemed to be an unusual number of construction deaths on the Strip. In early 2008, she was launched on the project, by which time nine construction workers had perished in 16 months. ‘We want to know what’s going on,’ Heikes told Berzon.

“This was Berzon’s first newspaper staff job. She had come to the Sun from a technology publication and before that the graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Berzon spent more than six weeks to prepare the first two stories in what would become a yearlong series of reports, slogging through the OSHA bureaucracy and ignoring threats of physical harm if she showed up at a union hall.

“‘I came to realize she had this combination of smarts and pugnaciousness,’ Heikes said. ‘She does not take no for an answer.’

“Before the Sun exposed the problems, construction safety had been a nonissue in Las Vegas. Worker deaths were considered the cost of doing business along the Strip, which was in the heat of a $32 billion building boom.”

Read more here.