Jack Jones | Watts reporter, 86

Jack Jones, 86, a longtime Los Angeles Times reporter who was part of a team that shared the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper's coverage of the Watts riots and their aftermath, died of lung disease Thursday at his Oceanside, Calif., home.

The Times received the Pulitzer for local reporting for its coverage of the several days of bloodshed and destruction during the Watts riots in August 1965 and for a follow-up series that ran the following October.

When order was restored, Times reporters returned to the community to gauge "The View From Watts," a series of several articles that ran under Jones' byline.

"Jack Jones was a reporter with a real social conscience, and he felt a deep obligation to the poor people he was covering," said Bill Boyarsky, a former Times city editor and columnist. "He just pursued it because it was the right thing to do."

He retired from the newspaper in 1989. - Los Angeles Times