Ms. Paige St. John

• 2011 winner, Investigative Reporting category
• Investigative Reporter of the Los Angeles Times (Investigative Reporter of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune when she won the Pulitzer Prize)

Paige St. John has been a working journalist for more than three decades, covering politics, the environment and natural disasters. She currently works in Sacramento, Calif., for the Los Angeles Times, covering the criminal justice system. Her prior posts include investigative reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, statehouse bureau chief for Gannett News Service, environment reporter for The Detroit News, and a wide range of beats for the Associated Press in Michigan and West Virginia.

St. John was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for an expose of Florida’s property insurance system, as well as eight other national or regional writing awards, including the Clarion, National Headliner and Green Eyeshade.  She is a product of what was once the nation’s smallest accredited journalism program (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) and continues the school’s tradition of multi-faceted journalism. Starting out as a roving feature reporter, she now specializes in database-driven projects, graphics and web sites, narrative writing and investigative reporting.

Past notable projects have exposed Florida’s failure to protect fragile beaches, the state’s notoriously botched electoral system, failure of medical device manufacturers and their federal regulators to recognize the high cost of human error, and widespread ethnic fraud within the nation’s higher education system. 

She lives with her daughter and husband, a fellow journalist, in northern California. They enjoy travel, horseback riding and kayaking.