It's been an awful year for the East Valley Tribune. The once-venerable newspaper laid off half of its staff and trimmed its publication from daily to four days a week — only to eventually shed even more staffers and cut back to three days. With many of the best staffers gone and the Web site an awful red mess, we can safely say the Trib has become entirely irrelevant. And yet this year, the paper scored a coup that demonstrates how one short year ago, it wasn't just going head to head with the Arizona Republic, it was killing it. The Trib's Pulitzer Prize for Local Coverage was well deserved — and it's certainly not the fault of (now departed) ace reporters Paul Giblin and Ryan Gabrielson that the thing seems more like a sad epitaph than a mark of ongoing quality.