WASHINGTON — They say these are hard times for reporters, but you’d think Pulitzer Prize winners were immune.

Rob Kuznia was one of three reporters at the Daily Breeze, in Torrance, California, who won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting on Monday “for their inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district, including impressive use of the paper’s website.”

But Kuznia isn’t at the Breeze anymore. He’s a publicist for the Shoah Foundation, at the University of Southern California. He told LA Observed that “it was too difficult to make ends meet on his newspaper salary while renting in the LA area.”

He told USC that he was surprised to win — the competition included reporters from the Chicago Tribune and Tulsa World, and the Breeze only has 63,000 subscribers. But he called the prize “a reminder to me that community journalism matters. A fourth estate is a really important part of our society.”

Still, even though he says he’s happy to be on the other side of journalism — “going from batter to pitcher” is how he described it to USC — LA Observed says “he admitted to a twinge of regret at no longer being a journalist.”

Read the series of stories for which Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci won the Pulitzer.

h/t Gawker