The Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Los Angeles Times this week seems to show as much about what’s wrong with journalism and democracy today as what’s right.

The Times won journalism’s most coveted prize, the annual public service award, last week for its coverage of the pay scandal in Bell, California.

There, seven municipal officials were jacking up property taxes and fees in order to pay themselves outlandish six-figure salaries.

The city manager in Bell, for instance, was taking home about $800,000 annually, about eight times as much as managers in similarly-sized communities and twice as much as the president of the U.S.

Some members of the council were getting paid $100,000 salaries for attending weekly meetings.

City Manager Robert Rizzo, Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other officials now are accused of bilking the city of about $5.5 million over a period of years.

Two L.A. Times reporters, Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, got wind of a prosecutor’s investigation, pushed hard to receive public records and exposed the scandal.

The Times has a long history of national and international coverage and has won 41 Pulitzer Prizes over the years. So there is no doubt the Times is capable of prize-winning work.

But the Bell scandal raises questions about whether major metro newspapers still have the resources to adequately cover local news as thoroughly as they once did.

Bell, with about 37,000 residents, is a city well within the metro area covered by the Times.

In a state like Maine, a community the size of Bell would have its own newspaper and reporters dedicated to covering that community alone.

That would likely involve a reporter sitting at every city council meeting and delving into tax increases, budgets and salaries. The local newspaper likely would have gone through budgets line-by-line looking for anything out of the ordinary.

At the very least, that reporter would be hearing from local people fed up with their tax rates, comparing those rates to other communities and asking questions.

If the L.A. Times had a reporter at all those meetings, we hope that person has now been fired.

More likely, the paper has simply been forced to abandon in-depth, day-to-day coverage of significant communities within its own circulation area.

Over the past decade, the paper has been through a change of ownership, a bankruptcy, a parade of editors and staff reductions.

Newspapers everywhere are facing similar pressures, but the cutback in news coverage has been far more dramatic at the nation’s largest papers.

As reading habits shift, and increasing numbers of people turn to the Web for community news coverage, news consumers will likely face a choice.

A variety of newspapers, from the New York Times to small community dailies, are beginning to experiment with charging for access to Web news.

It is not year clear how those experiments will turn out. Eventually, however, news consumers may have to decide whether local news coverage is worth a couple of quarters a day.

As the problems in Bell, California, show, there is also a dramatic price to be paid for the absence of aggressive news coverage.

The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.

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