Jones covered the newspaper industry for "The New York Times" from 1983 until 1992. His prize-winning story "The Fall of the House of Bingham" concerned events that ended in 1986 with the sale of Louisville, Kentucky media—two newspapers and three broadcast stations—after 15 years of management by Barry Bingham, Jr. The following year Jones won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting (predecessor of the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting), recognizing that work as "a skillful and sensitive report of a powerful newspaper family's bickering and how it led to the sale of a famed media empire."