Las Vegas biz reporter wins Pulitzer

Alexandra Berzon, a business reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday in the public service category for her coverage of a high rate of construction deaths on the Las Vegas strip that led to changes in policy and safer working conditions.

The paper’s Web site states, “As the Sun pursued the story, the newspaper reported on cozy relationships existing between safety regulators and builders. Angered by the revelations and continuing death toll, workers walked off the job at MGM Mirage’s CityCenter, shutting down the largest private commercial development in U.S. history until the contractors agreed to safety improvements.

“Twelve workers had died in 18 months. But after the improvements, the deaths stopped. No workers have died since June 2008.”

Berzon began working for the Las Vegas Sun as a business reporter in 2007. She has also worked as a reporter for Red Herring, a technology magazine, the Anchorage Daily News and the San Antonio Express-News.

Berzon, 29, received an undergraduate degree in urban studies from Vassar College in 2001. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 2006.

As a student at Berkeley, Berzon reported for Salon.com, NPR’s Living on Earth, and American Public Media’s American Radio Works. Her radio work dealt with a community of South Pacific islanders who had emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand because of fears of sea level rise from global warming. The broadcasts were part of a multi-part series that won the George Polk Award for Radio Reporting in 2007.

Berzon’s stories on construction safety at the Sun were awarded the 2008 Story of the Year, News Feature of the Year and First Amendment awards by the Nevada Press Association.

She grew up in Berkeley, Calif., where her parents are lawyers and her mother is a justice on the U.S. Ninth Circuit.

Read her stories here.