The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for revealing that politicians in a small, working-class California city were paying themselves exorbitant salaries. But for the first time in the Pulitzers’ 95-year history, no award was given in the category of breaking news — the bread and butter of daily journalism.

In a year when the big stories included the devastating earthquake in Haiti and the Gulf oil spill, the Pulitzer Board didn’t like the entries in the breaking news category enough to honor any of them with the most prestigious award in journalism.

The Los Angeles Times won for its series revealing that politicians in Bell, Calif., were drawing salaries well into six figures. The newspaper’s reporting that officials in the struggling city of 37,000 people were raising property taxes and other fees in part to cover the huge salaries led to arrests and the ouster of some of Bell’s top officials. Read more here…