Another Pulitzer winner quits journalism for PR

When Natalie Caula Hauff learnt on Monday that the reporting team, which she used to work with, of the Post and Courier from Charleston, South Carolina, received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, she is no longer in the journalism profession.

Hauff shared the byline of the Post and Courier's "Till Death Do Us Part," a riveting series that probed why South Carolina is among "the deadliest states in the union for women" and put the issue of what to do about it on the state's agenda. But the highest honor for American journalism came too late as she has taken a job in PR for family reasons.

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Hauff said her choice was because she recently got married and wanted to focus on family.

Hauff shared a similar story with another top journalism prizewinner this year -- Rob Kuznia of a little known newspaper Daily Breeze in Torrance, California, who had quitted the profession to "make ends meet" when the prizes were announced.

Kuznia was honored on Monday a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting with the Daily Breeze "for their inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-stripped school district, including impressive use of the paper's website."

But "Kuznia left the Breeze and journalism last year and is currently a publicist in the communications department of the USC Shoah Foundation," a non-profit organization aimed to record testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, the LA Observed website reported after the award was announced.

LA Observed, which contacted Kuznia after the prestigious award was announced, said the former reporter "admitted to a twinge of regret at no longer being a journalist, but he said it was too difficult to make ends meet on his newspaper salary while renting in the LA area."

In another interview on the Shoah Foundation website, Kuznia ruled out a return to his former profession, and expressed satisfaction in working on "global issues of the highest magnitude, " such as the fight against genocide and for greater tolerance.

"I'm very excited to be playing on a bigger stage," Kuznia said.

First awarded in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize was established by Hungarian-American publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Each winner receives a certificate and a 10,000-U.S. dollar cash award.

This year, there was a robust competition with finalists coming from 24 different news organizations in the 14 journalism categories. Winners represented 12 organizations, with The New York Times and Los Angeles Times winning three and two awards respectively. Endite