Pulitzer winner St. John to join LA Times

Paige St. John, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her coverage of Florida’s property and casualty insurance industry, is leaving the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for a job with the Los Angeles Times.

Ashley Dunn, an assistant managing editor at the Times, sent out the following announcement:

We are pleased to announce that Paige St. John, a veteran investigative reporter, will join The Times’ Sacramento bureau in July.

Paige comes to us from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where she was awarded the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting last year after exposing how Florida’s weak oversight of the insurance industry created a financial house of cards poised to collapse on property owners. As a result of her reporting, homeowners were refunded millions of dollars and new state regulations were created.

Paige has covered an array of statehouse beats, having worked for the AP in Charleston, W. Va., and served as bureau chief for Gannett in Tallahassee. She was also an environment reporter at the Detroit News. A self-taught data junkie and Web wizard, she’ll focus on the prison system and state agencies in Sacramento.

She will report to Sacramento Bureau Chief Evan Halper and Deputy Metro Editor Linda Rogers.

Here is a 2011 Q&A that St. John did with Talking Biz News about her series on insurance.