Editor Russ Stanton sent the following award announcement to the newsroom:

The Pulitzer Prizes we celebrated yesterday honored our coverage of events in our own backyard.

Today brings further recognition -- this time for our foreign reporting.

Our coverage of last year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti has won a 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

The Times’ winning entry in the international print category showcased the work of reporters Joe Mozingo, Scott Kraft, Tracy Wilkinson, Tina Susman, Ken Ellingwood and Mitchell Landsberg and photographer Liz Baylen.

The RFK Award recognizes “outstanding reporting on human rights, social justice and the power of individual action.”

All were themes of our reporting on the disaster in Haiti. Among the highlights were Joe’s heart-rending story about a mother’s quest to save her child from a cholera epidemic, Scott’s piece on an 11-year-old street urchin surviving on wits alone in the days after the quake, and Liz’s gallery of still and video images that showed how one survivor struggled to master an artificial leg and then rebuilt his ruined home with scraps of wood and sheet metal.

Please join me in toasting these colleagues and their distinguished work.

Barbara Davidson wins the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for "Caught in the Crossfire." 

[Updated, 1:30 p.m.: Here is the Pulitzer board's award citation.]

The Times staff has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the city of Bell salary scandal.

The series -- "Breach of Faith," led by Jeff Gotlieb and Ruben Vives -- also won an IRE medal, a George Polk Award for local reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Press Club’s first-ever Public Service Award.

[Updated 1 p.m.: Here is the award citation from the Pulitzer board.]

Photos: Jeff Gottlieb (left); Ruben Vives. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Editor Russ Stanton sent the following award announcement to the newsroom:

Congratulations to Jim Rainey, who today was named the winner of the 2010 Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism by Pennsylvania State University for a series of columns about the deteriorating quality of local TV news.

The award recognizes distinguished contributions to the improvement of print and broadcast journalism through responsible analysis or critical evaluation. The judges praised Jim for shedding light on the practice by local stations of passing off paid advertisements as news, without the proper notification required under law.

“He took on an issue that deserved attention and what he did made a difference,” the judges said. “His work led to action.”

Jim’s series led to the departure of the news director of one network affiliate in Los Angeles and prompted a public interest group to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission.

The Bart Richards Award, presented annually by the College of Communications at Penn State, was established in 1994 in memory of a longtime Pennsylvania newspaper writer and editor who advocated for journalistic ethics and responsible community journalism.

Past winners include Columbia Journalism Review, PBS’ “Frontline,” Byron Calame of the New York Times and Sydney Schanberg of the Village Voice. Jim, the first Los Angeles Times journalist to win the award, will be recognized at a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington next month.

It's not 584 degrees in Eureka.

That's what Monday's weather page reported for Sunday's high temperature in the Northern California city. It's clearly a typo, but a couple of readers had some fun reporting the error.

"According to your California Cities weather reports, Eureka has been having a hot spell for the past week, with temperatures over 500 degrees," said Martin Zacks of Altadena in an email. "The forecast always is for a cooling trend into the 50s, but each previous day is listed around 580 degrees. If your figures are correct, Eureka has the highest temperature in California, the nation, and perhaps the planet."

And Lorraine Gayer of Huntington Beach wrote, "It is hard not to believe in global warming when, according to your weather section, Eureka's Sunday high temperature was 584 degrees. Yikes."

Yikes, indeed.

The error will be corrected in the For the Record section.

-- Deirdre Edgar

Editor Russ Stanton sent the following award announcement to the newsroom:

Team Bell keeps raking in the honors.

This time, it’s another biggie: the IRE Medal.

Here’s what the judges at Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. had to say in giving the organization’s top honor to Jeff Gottlieb, Ruben Vives and a posse of Times colleagues:

“At a time when many news organizations are pulling back and reducing coverage of outlying cities, the Los Angeles Times uncovered a story of incredible greed in one of the state’s poorest towns….The impact of the series has been far-flung, including resignations, arrests and the refund of $2.9 million in overpaid taxes and fees.”

Along with Jeff and Ruben, who got the ball rolling on Bell, the judges recognized Kim Christensen, Hector Becerra, Corina Knoll, Robert J. Lopez, Paloma Esquivel, Paul Pringle, Jessica Garrison, Richard Winton, Scott Gold, Kim Murphy, Shelby Grad, Steve Marble, Kimi Yoshino, Megan Garvey and Maloy Moore.

Another signature Times project, “Grading the Teachers,” was one of four finalists for the IRE Medal. The judges recognized Jason Felch and Jason Song, along with Doug Smith, Sandra Poindexter, Ken Schwencke, Julie Marquis, Beth Shuster, Stephanie Ferrell and Thomas Lauder.

The Bell coverage previously won a George Polk Award for local reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Press Club’s first-ever Public Service Award.

Congratulations to all.

A memo from Managing Editor/Online Jimmy Orr:

Latimes.com hit a record 195.2 million page views for March. This easily trumps our previous best of 153.6 million in December 2010. We also saw a record number of 33 million unique visitors -- a jump of more than 8 million over our previous high in October 2010. And we saw our page views per visit increase significantly as well.

News events, of course, contributed to these records: the Japan earthquake and its aftermath; the death of Elizabeth Taylor; the unrest in North Africa and the Mideast; baseball’s opening day; and Charlie Sheen’s drama, to name a few.

But it was the way we covered events -- not the events themselves -- that made the difference. Bruce Wallace reports that Jeff Fleishman’s wife, living in Cairo in the midst of the madness, said she found Molly Hennessy-Fiske’s reporting on the blog to be among the most innovative and interesting anywhere. 

It was the continuous publication of new stories on topics people were interested in that contributed greatly to the record numbers. Frequently posting new stories, not merely updating existing ones, made the difference. This successful strategy better serves our readers.

Coming up at 11 a.m. Friday: Chat with beat writer Dylan Hernandez on the Dodgers.

Re: today's Jumble puzzle, remember what day it is...

"Cross words about the crossword" -- readers Karen Banse and Jonathan Mandel each wrote with a similar play on words. They are among the readers who have emailed recently to lament changes in The Times' Sunday crossword puzzle.

The complaints have a sad origin. Sylvia Bursztyn, who had been creating Sunday crosswords for The Times since 1980, died Dec. 30. Her last puzzle was published Jan. 9.

Since then, puzzles by Merl Reagle, which had alternated weeks with Bursztyn's, have run each Sunday.

Bursztyn had a loyal following. She joined Barry Tunick in April 1980 to help create the Sunday crossword and continued on her own after his death in 2007. Though Reagle has his own cadre of fans across the country, his style is quite different from hers.

In recent weeks, readers have complained that Reagle's puzzles are "way-out-of-the-box challenging," "stilted, relying on puns" and "an exercise in irritation."

"Change is a hard thing, and solving is a very personal thing," Reagle said by email.

Reagle’s Oscar-themed puzzle on Feb. 27 used numerals in two of the answers, which raised some hackles. "Stop using numbers in your puzzles," Carolyn Gordon wrote in an email that she asked be forwarded to Reagle. "It isn't cute, and it isn't clever. It's just cheating, plain and simple. If you want to SPELL out the numbers, as in 'five' and 'three,' that's allowed, but using the number depicted as a number isn't fair."

Reagle said the use of numbers -- or multiple letters, or easily drawn shapes -- in an answer square is common in crossword magazines as well as in the New York Times puzzle.

"I wouldn't want to do one every week -- far from it -- but I thought I'd at least do a few with numerals for starters," he said in his email. "Mind you, this is not a casual, willy-nilly thing; the numerals have to be parts of theme answers, not just something thrown in for variety's sake. In the case of my recent Oscar crossword it was necessary because the movies being punned on were '127 Hours' and 'Toy Story 3'  -- and spelling the numbers out would have looked pretty weird."

As Washington bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro wrote Friday, Washington is consumed with lowering the annual deficit and heading off a debt crisis some experts warn could be a few years off.

Some lawmakers are working on a bipartisan blueprint to change to the way the federal government taxes, spends and provides such core services as Medicare and Social Security. Others took their own stabs at reducing the annual $1.4-trillion deficit. What's new, and what’s likely to happen before a funding stopgap expires next week?

Join Mascaro for a live chat Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT. She’ll take your questions, and we'll talk about the federal budget, what is being done to prevent a government shutdown in the short term, and what has been proposed to address deficit problems in the long term.

Go to the chat, on the Chicago Tribune's Trib Nation blog.

Times Editor Russ Stanton made the following staff announcement today:

After a 17-year journey through Business, Science and National, Deputy National Editor Ashley Dunn is returning to Metro this week – as California editor.

Ashley is succeeding David Lauter in this position, which is accompanied by the masthead-level title of assistant managing editor, and will now supervise our newsroom’s largest group of reporters and editors.

In his distinguished career as a reporter and editor, Ashley has helped oversee our coverage of the dot-com boom and bust, the space shuttle Columbia explosion, the election of Barack Obama and, more recently, the gulf oil spill.