Planting a Pulitzer
<p>Tampa Bay Times reporters Michael LaForgia, left, and Will Hobson, center, are congratulated by Editor and Vice President Neil Brown, right, after they won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, April 14 in St. Petersburg, Fla.</p>
It has been 20 years since longtime Fernan Lake Village resident Jack Rogers planted a seed that would grow into a Pulitzer Prize.
Jack and Marlys Rogers' grandson, Florida journalist Michael LaForgia, 30, was awarded a Pulitzer last week for local reporting for the Tampa Bay Times.
"My Grandpa Jack was the first person to expose me to great journalism. When I was a 10-year-old living in South Carolina, I remember he bought me a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly, and he kept renewing it until I was done with high school," wrote LaForgia, in an email interview from Florida. "It was the first time I ever had read anything like that. It's very possible I never would have gotten into journalism if it weren't for him."
The Pulitzer was awarded to LaForgia and another Tampa Bay Times reporter, Will Hobson, 29, for stories that exposed corruption in a government agency charged with providing transitional housing for the homeless in Florida's Hillsborough County.
LaForgia and Hobson are the youngest Times journalists to win a Pulitzer. The paper has been awarded the national honor 10 times.
The reporters' prize-winning body of work uncovered inhumane treatment of the homeless, who were living in squalid, unsafe conditions, while millions of public dollars were being funneled to slum lords by the county's Homeless Recovery program.
"Several ranking county employees resigned or were fired in the wake of the Times' stories, which eventually led to the permanent dissolution of the Homeless Recovery program and the outsourcing of homeless services to local nonprofit groups," stated The Times, in an April 14 story about their receipt of the prize.
LaForgia joined the newspaper in 2012, the same year it changed its name from the St. Petersburg Times to the Tampa Bay Times. Before that, he spent six years as a reporter for The Palm Beach Post, where he covered gang wars, Florida's prescription painkiller crisis and abuses within state juvenile jails.
LaForgia grew up in Summerville, S.C. His grandfather, Jack Rogers, was a newspaper reporter in the 1950s.
"After I had gotten a few bylines at my college paper, at the University of South Carolina, I remember visiting with my Grandpa while he was on vacation in Tybee Island, Ga. He brought along some of his old clips from his days as a newspaperman, and it thrilled me that we had the job in common," LaForgia told The Press. "I'm glad I got the chance to make him proud."
Read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tampa Bay Times stories by LaForgia and Hobson here: A Home, But No Help