Congratulations to Sara Ganim and the Patriot-News on winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting; and to David Kocieniewski of the New York Times on his win for Explanatory Reporting.

Ganim won the Pulitzer and the December Sidney Award for her expose of the Penn State sex abuse scandal. David Kocieniewski won his Pulitzer for explaining how the richest people and businesses get out of paying taxes. He won the March 2011 Sidney Award for a story on how General Electric minimizes its tax bill.

Congratulations also to Danny Hakim and Russ Buettner whose investigation of abuse and neglect in New York group homes made the New York Times a Pulitzer finalist for Public Service. That investigation also garnered an honorable mention for the 2012 Hillman Prize.

The best of the week’s news. Submit your favorite investigative and public interest stories by tweeting the link to @SidneyHillman with the hashtag #Sidney.

• A woman and her severely disabled daughter nearly had their house foreclosed upon even though Bank of America agreed to lower the monthly payments on the home equity loan the mother took out to retrofit the dwelling to care for her daughter, Gale Holland reports for the LA Times. Dirma Rodriguez had been keeping up with her modified payments, awaiting a final renegotiation, but the bank sold the home out from under her. Holland found out about the case through Occupy Fights Foreclosure, an offshoot of the 99% Movement that defended the home in March.
• The Public Advocate’s office is calling on New York City to stop washing its fleet at car washes owned by Lage Management Company because the owner John Lage is under investigation for stealing wages from his own employees, Erica Pearson reports for the New York Daily News. This story is part of Pearson’s ongoing coverage of a campaign to improve working conditions at New York City car washes.
• So-called “toxin-free” nail polishes aren’t toxin free after all, according to a new report by California regulators, the announcements raise health concerns for the state’s 120,000 licensed nail technicians, four fifths of whom are Vietnamese women, Anna Gorman reports in the LA Times.
• Is your employer quietly pocketing your state income taxes? David Cay Johnston of Reuters reports that 2700 companies, including big names like Sears and General Electric, are allowed to keep their employees’ state tax contributions without telling them under so-called tax diversion agreements with state governments.
• Part memoir, part reportage: Gabriel Arana of the American Prospect takes an in-depth look at the fraudulent “ex-gay” movement.

Trymaine Lee has won the April Sidney Award for his coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Lee, a senior reporter at the Huffington Post, spearheaded his site’s reporting effort, which helped turn the killing of Martin into a national cause.

On Feb. 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watch captain who claims he shot the unarmed black youth in self-defense.

Lee’s March 8th story drew national attention to the killing which, until then, was only being covered by local media. As the story garnered ever greater attention, he persuaded his editors to send him on assignment to Florida.

Lee unearthed facts about George Zimmerman’s history of violence. In Florida, he obtained an interview with the youngest witness to the shooting, a 13-year-old black youth who told the reporter, “If I was like two years older, that could have happened to me.”

Lee’s work on this story demonstrates the power of a single, enterprising journalist to shape the national conversation.

Click here to read my interview with Lee.

Welfare reporm was hailed as a triumph of “tough love” during the boom years of the Clinton administration. What looked like a smashing success during good times turned out to be a bust when the economy soured, Jason DeParle reports for the New York Times. The goal was to give welfare recipients an incentive to look for work, on the assumption that they could find jobs if they wanted them. That made sense in an economy where there were jobs available, but welfare expenditures stayed low throughout the recession as unemployment soared to record levels:

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said. [NYT]

Currently, many as one in four low-income single mothers, 1.5 million women, has neither a job nor cash benefits. The number of households with children living on less than $2 per person, per day has doubled since 1996. One in 50 children in the U.S. lives in such a household, even if you count foodstamps as cash.

Jason DeParle won the 1995 Hillman prize for his book, American Dream: Three Women, 10 Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare.

[Photo credit: bartmaguire, Creative Commons.]