For the second time in five years, a Portland reporter has been honored with a Pulitzer prize. The Oregonian's Edward Walsh is in a surprisingly deferrential mood this morning with his treatment of Willamette Week's big score.

Nigel Jaquiss, a reporter for the alternative weekly newspaper Willamette Week, won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting Monday for his exposure of former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt's sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl.

The revelations of abuse, which disgraced one of the most admired public figures in modern Oregon history, provoked an uproar in the state and is still causing repercussions. Goldschmidt, a powerbroker in state politics, withdrew from all public activities after he admitted the abuse as Willamette Week prepared to publish last May.

"It's a fantastic honor and really unexpected," Jaquiss said. Willamette Week is only the third alternative weekly paper -- after the Boston Phoenix and New York's Village Voice -- to be awarded journalism's highest prize.

The Pulitzer Board announced the prizes in New York City. The Oregonian was one of three finalists in the national reporting category for its series about the methamphetamine epidemic. That category was won by Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times for stories about the corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal accidents at railroad crossings.

It came as a surprise to see last month that two of Oregon's papers were being considered for the Pulitzer. Perhaps the news coverage in the city is not quite as bad as some of us think.