Michael Hiltzik Golden State Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael A. Hiltzik, who writes the twice-weekly "Golden State" column most Mondays and Thursdays, has been a staff member of the Los Angeles Times for more than 20 years. In that time he has worked as a financial and political writer, as a foreign correspondent serving in Africa and Russia, and as a technology and science writer and editor. He is the author of the book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, published to widespread critical acclaim in 1999 by HarperCollins. Hiltzik has won numerous awards for excellence in reporting, including a Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association and a citation from the Overseas Press Club for coverage of East Africa. He and colleague Chuck Philips received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry, particularly in the recorded music business. Among other issues, the articles illuminated the operations of the Grammy Awards organization, the non-profit National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, showing that the Academy's two charities paid out to assist indigent and infirm musicians only a bare fraction of the millions of dollars it received as donations from record companies and performers, while paying its own executives lavish salaries. Other articles in the award-winning package described the shortcomings of drug detoxification programs sponsored by Hollywood institutions, and identified new forms of "payola," or illicit payments for the promotion of music recordings, in the radio industry.