The Post and Courier staff cheers after the Pulitzer prize announcement Monday, April 20, 2015 in its Charleston, S.C. The newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its series on domestic violence. The Public Service gold medal went to reporters Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff for the series Till Death Do Us Part. The series explored the deaths of 300 women in the past decade and a legal system in which abusers face at most 30 days in jail if convicted of attacking a woman, while cruelty to a dog can bring up to five years in prison. ( Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP) — The Post and Courier staff cheers after the Pulitzer prize announcement Monday, April 20, 2015 in its Charleston, South Carolina. The newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its series on domestic violence. The Public Service gold medal went to reporters Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff for the series Till Death Do Us Part. While they remain in journalism, another Pulitzer winner, Rob Kuzia, quit the profession because it didn’t pay enough. AP

WASHINGTON, United States – A Pulitzer prize honoring his work as a journalist came a bit too late for Rob Kuznia, who had to quit the profession because it didn’t pay enough.

Kuznia, 39, was honored Monday for his reporting with the Daily Breeze, a 63,000 circulation newspaper in Torrance, California.

His expose about corruption in a southern California school system caught the eye of Pulitzer judges who awarded it American journalism’s highest honor.

But after the award was announced, the LA Observed website reported that Kuznia quit journalism last year and now works as a publicist for the USC Shoah Foundation — an organization dedicated to documenting eyewitness accounts from the Holocaust and other genocides.

Not enough to make ends meet

LA Observed, which contacted Kuznia after the prestigious award was announced, said the former reporter “admitted to a twinge of regret at no longer being a journalist, but he said it was too difficult to make ends meet on his newspaper salary while renting in the LA area.”

In another interview on the Shoah Foundation website, Kuznia ruled out a return to his former profession, and expressed satisfaction in working on “global issues of the highest magnitude,” such as the fight against genocide and for greater tolerance.

“I’m very excited to be playing on a bigger stage,” Kuznia said.

The Pulitzer committee, in announcing the award, hailed the Daily Breeze’s “inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district, including impressive use of the paper’s website.”

First awarded in 1917, Pulitzer Prizes honor work published by US news organizations, or of American authors and composers.