By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, February 2011
In late February 2011, LA Times reporters Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb were announced as winners of the 2011 Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting — recognizing their work breaking the story of outrageous city-official salaries in Bell, California.
Then
The Bell salary scandal had been one of the most consequential California local-government accountability stories of the past several decades. Vives and Gottlieb’s July 2010 reporting had documented that Bell — a working-class city of about 36,000 in southeast LA County — had been paying its city manager Robert Rizzo nearly $800,000 per year, plus substantial salaries to other top officials. The disclosures triggered immediate state-and-federal investigations.
The Selden Ring Award — given annually by USC Annenberg for investigative reporting — was one of multiple major journalism awards the Bell investigation went on to collect. The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service followed shortly after.
Ruben Vives was, at the time of the original reporting, a relatively junior LA Times reporter — the Bell story had been the major breakthrough of his early career. Jeff Gottlieb was a more senior reporter who had been at the LA Times for years.
Now
The Bell corruption case produced criminal charges against Robert Rizzo, Mayor Oscar Hernandez, and six other Bell officials. Rizzo eventually pleaded no contest to 69 counts and was sentenced to 12 years in state prison.
Ruben Vives has continued at the LA Times across the years since 2011. Jeff Gottlieb retired from the LA Times in 2018 after a long career at the paper.
The Bell investigation has aged into being one of the most-cited examples of how a single major investigative project can produce both substantial criminal-justice outcomes and durable institutional reform.
The LA Times itself went through the 2018 Patrick Soon-Shiong ownership transition. The 2011 piece reads now as a documented moment of LA-region investigative journalism producing the kind of national-recognition cycle that has become structurally rarer in the post-contraction newspaper economy.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.