News-Record.com

You'll have to forgive News & Record alumna and columnist Rosemary Roberts for a being a proud mom. Her son, Jim Yardley, has just won journalism's highest honor, a Pulitzer Prize, for international reporting. Jim, of The New York Times, is sharing the prize with another Times reporter, Joseph Kahn, "for their ambitious stories on ragged justice in China as the booming nation's legal system evolves," the Pulitzer Web site says.

Jim is a Greensboro native and a Page High School graduate who went on to college at Carolina. (That explains why Rosemary has e-mailed basketball scores to him in China.)

She is especially pleased that Jim, whose father is another Greensboro Daily News alum, Jonathan Yardley of Washington Post fame, worked his way up "the way you're supposed to," ... from a suburban weekly ultimately to The Times.

Coincidentally, Jim who still lives in China, will be in Greensboro tomorrow night. He's come Stateside for a wedding in Chapel Hill.

By the way, Rosemary admits she advised her son not to go into journalism -- to be a "well-paid lawyer" instead.

Fortunately he didn't listen to Mom, and did as she did, not as she said.

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post for his powerful accounts of the deadly violence faced by ordinary American soldiers in Iraq as an insurgency intensified, and Sebastian Rotella of the Los Angeles Times for his well crafted reports on restive Muslims in Europe that foretold riots in France.
a series on China’s legal system.