Eighteen months into reporting on the pipeline of medicine from Honduras to San Francisco, Megan Cassidy and her reporting and picture associate Gabrielle Lurie had an abundance of vivid materials. Avenue nook scenes of an all-but-open fentanyl market within the Tenderloin. Interviews with surprisingly candid drug sellers in each San Francisco and the tiny cities in Honduras the place a lot of the medication come from.
It wasn’t till the very finish of the method a return journey to a cluster of cities within the Siria Valley, although, Cassidy instructed me, that she discovered what can be the result in their Poynter Prize-winning undertaking. “I had been involved whether or not we have been precisely describing (the locations the place the highest sellers lived) as mansions somewhat than simply actually massive homes.” She determined, sure, they have been mansions.
On this go to rather more than their first, the San Francisco Chronicle workforce noticed San Francisco icons in all places — youngsters in Steph Curry T-shirts, logos of the Warriors, 49ers, and Giants on gates and shops, even a bas aid of the Golden Gate Bridge on a storage door.
Drug operating was the principle trade within the Siria Valley; so its residents paid tribute to their sister vacation spot metropolis as a second hometown.
After a colourful rendering of the feel and appear of cities within the Siria Valley, the lead story in their project reverted to a crisp, naked model. The information didn’t want dressing up; there have been few adjectives or adverbs. The Poynter Prize judges awarded the undertaking, “Probing San Francisco’s drug trade,” the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence. They commented, “The anecdotes chosen to inform the story are easy and searing, together with … vibrant scenes of the humanitarian catastrophe that medication have created within the metropolis’s Tenderloin neighborhood.”
The judges additionally noticed that it was a living proof of the axiom that “impactful writing begins with distinctive reporting.”
The Deborah Howell Award acknowledges distinguished achievement in writing in any medium and comes with a $2,500 prize sponsored by Advance Publications, Inc.
Beat crime reporter Cassidy considers herself a reporter first, not a writing stylist. However ultimately, she turned immersed within the writing self-discipline.
“Our editor, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, drilled this one into me all through the writing/ modifying a part of the story. Present don’t inform. Present don’t inform. My default means of writing is to paraphrase the reporting’s findings (inform) after which to again that up with examples (present). Many, many paraphrased grafs have been killed in the course of the making of this story. … There was a chilly conflict between me and Emilio. … I fought to maintain (a lot of) them in, however he was proper.”
I requested Cassidy to stroll me by way of how the undertaking took form, each the reporting and the writing. It turned out to be fairly the story.
It began quickly after Garcia-Ruiz, beforehand the highest digital editor at The Washington Submit, started because the Chronicle’s editor-in-chief within the fall of 2020. He had been listening to in regards to the Honduran connection from each his employees and others he met and rapidly turned an advocate for the undertaking. I requested Cassidy if that mirrored The Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuses in the Catholic Church in 2002, commissioned by new editor Marty Baron and later memorialized within the film “Highlight.”
“Completely,” she stated, “It was precisely that. … Loads of us knew about it (the Honduras connection). … We had all the time needed to do one thing. Emilio noticed the potential straight away.”
Photographer Lurie, who has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice for photographs of drug dealing within the metropolis, was on board from early on. The truth is, she took a lead in framing the pitch. The 2 ladies’s personalities meshed into an efficient workforce, Cassidy stated. “She pushes greater than me,” and moved the undertaking forward when the reporting encountered lulls.
“At first, we have been prepared to set the bar low,” Cassidy stated. “We weren’t so certain that any drug sellers would discuss. … We thought possibly you’ll find a priest” as a supply who knew the drug scene intimately.
Cassidy was keen but additionally skeptical. “That’s the place Gabrielle performed an enormous position. Being despatched out of city, I used to be nervous that we might get there and sit on our arms.”
They did hit lifeless ends — ditched after they arrived for some promised interviews, instructed of a key city that turned out to not be concerned in any respect.
Nonetheless because the persistent digging continued, the pair finally hit a reporting jackpot. It turned out the medication weren’t flowing to San Francisco from throughout Honduras, Cassidy stated, however as an alternative all got here from the identical cluster of small cities.
The workforce all of a sudden knew “proper, proper the place to go.”
In Honduras and again within the States, they in the end landed 25 interviews of present and retired sellers, many prepared to be quoted by title.
Winston Guerrero, a former supplier who migrated from Honduras, says he was impressed to stop promoting and utilizing medication after speaking to his nephew, Jacob Rodas López (proper). (Gabrielle Lurie/San Fransisco Chronicle)
Whereas the reporting didn’t contain bullets flying over their heads, they labored in high-danger zones. In a single city, a gang conflict had been occurring. They engaged safety and stayed elsewhere, leaving the city by early afternoon.
Three months earlier than the publication date, Cassidy undertook the unfamiliar job of pulling collectively her huge retailer of fabric. “It went by way of so many iterations … the primary draft was nothing like the ultimate,” she stated.
At one level, she recalled being greater than a bit of intimidated when she and Lurie acquired referred to as to “an enormous, high-level assembly … massive easels throughout the room.” That yielded a means of organizing, she stated — as a lot as potential letting the eyes and phrases of the sellers inform the story in sequence.
It additionally turned clear that some sturdy materials didn’t match properly in the principle tales and ended up damaged individually into two sidebars. The primary was a protracted interview of a girl ending a time period in jail, speaking about her position and the way the drug commerce operated. The opposite profiled a present, nameless supplier (with the qualifier that he may need been embellishing in spots).
Whereas the scenes of the drug sellers stand out, the authors artfully wove in additional standard matters:
- The political context wherein Mayor London Breed was accused of leniency on medication and homelessness. (She was voted out of office earlier this month.)
- The geography of the pipeline. The medication have been really manufactured in Mexico. Honduran mules did a few of the treacherous smuggling into the U.S.; Honduran sellers, the road gross sales.
- A couple of of the drug employees have been trafficked, as their protection attorneys have claimed. Most have been freely drawn to the cash they might make after dwelling in dead-end poverty. They knew San Francisco was a sanctuary metropolis, however got here as a result of they knew others who have been prospering there somewhat than as a result of it was a lenient setting.
They harvested what information was accessible to doc the extent of the issue. However in comparison with a typical massive investigation, Cassidy stated, there was not a lot of it and the court docket information “have been tremendous dry and missing a lot substance or element.”
That will have been a blessing in disguise, tilting what they wrote and illustrated. “99% of the world we have been attempting to elucidate lives exterior of something that’s formally documented,” she added, so the stability naturally tilted in one other route.
On a primary learn of the undertaking, I used to be struck by how integral Lurie’s images have been to the storytelling. There have been a lot of them, they usually have been paced to match an adjoining level within the textual content.
When the forerunner awards of the Poynter Prizes have been conceived 45 years in the past, all of them were for writing, and there was no regard for a way they have been illustrated. The web has largely erased these strains.
Lurie defined to me through electronic mail how she noticed her contribution. “The reporting was about ‘displaying’ and was typically observational. It wasn’t simply based mostly on interviews however what we have been seeing in actual time. We knew that I would wish images of the mansions and particulars of the San Francisco iconography. We additionally needed to have the human components and labored very arduous to get consent from folks for that. I had so many photos that can by no means see the sunshine of day however would have additionally labored properly with the textual content.
“In the end, Megan and I have been very in sync, and she or he was respectful of what I wanted so we have been capable of stability photos and reporting. We knew sure components that have been wanted and went again to Honduras a second time to make sure we had these…
“Executing the pictures each in Honduras and right here in San Francisco was extraordinarily difficult. In Honduras, I principally photographed from automobile home windows except I used to be invited into somebody’s house. A few instances I stepped out of the automobile and males who have been extremely armed rapidly approached me to intimidate me.
“In San Francisco, I struggled much more. I photographed from undercover police automobiles (with tinted home windows), condominium buildings and parking garages. Generally if it felt proper, I’d be exterior in plain sight, however that was uncommon.”
Despite the fact that hazard was not a continuing in reporting the undertaking, Cassidy agreed, it by no means was that distant. Apologizing for a probably sexist query, I requested whether or not two ladies may need been particularly peril taking the project and brave to do it.
“Our editors gave us a number of credit score for that,” Cassidy stated, “however in addition they stated we have been the 2 most certified folks.”
And possibly there have been benefits to being a girl within the circumstances, she has mirrored. “A person getting out of the automobile may need appeared extra intimidating,” extra more likely to have drawn an armed response.
Given the pair’s dedication, I used to be additionally not stunned to be taught that even after the undertaking was revealed in July 2023 and on its means as an entry to contests, their involvement within the story was not over. This February, Cassidy and Lurie shared a byline with one different reporter on three sellers being introduced again from Honduras to face trial in San Francisco.
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Eugene Patterson, as editor of the St. Petersburg Instances, was the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and creator of those prizes in 1979. Patterson, an awfully sleek author himself, thought there have been already many prizes for nice investigative reporting however none the place the main target was on writing. The prizes have advanced and have been moved in 2023 to Poynter as ASNE dissolved. The Deborah Howell Award, which Cassidy and Lurie gained, is one amongst 10 prizes nonetheless particularly for writing excellence.
Listed here are two excerpts from the Chronicle’s entry, the primary from Honduras:
One afternoon final November in El Pedernal, a village of 1,600 residents, a longtime San Francisco supplier on a go to house rested on his balcony as he oversaw a few dozen employees laying concrete for his new driveway. The unnamed dust roads beneath him vibrated with hammers and buzz saws as crews assembled the brand new houses of his neighbors.
The three-bedroom house occupied by his spouse and kids price him $150,000 — the equal of about 5 good months of drug gross sales for him within the Tenderloin — however he marveled on the grandeur of a few of his neighbors’ properties.
“A bit boy, 17 years (previous), he constructed this home,” the supplier stated, pointing to a mansion underneath building. “You open the door — lovely.”
And from San Francisco:
On a weekday afternoon in June, a person in his early 30s lay immobile on a SoMa sidewalk exterior the Federal Constructing. On his proper, a dozen customers smoked fentanyl and crack cocaine or hung bent on the waist, heads suspended at their knees. To his left, a handful of sellers, cloaked in black however for the house round their eyes, continued promoting whereas a passerby revived the person with Narcan, the nasal-spray antidote to opioid overdoses, and as paramedics arrived to deal with him a couple of minutes later.
