Mission Local has operated as a training site for new reporters in San Francisco for more than a decade — the top pick for young journalists in the city who want freedom to experiment and know they can get a premier education in street reporting, deep-dives, and follow-ups.
This year more than any yet, our digital and data reporting chops came through: We have a team of fantastic young data reporters who have imbued our coverage with first-rate visuals, explaining otherwise unintelligible concepts. Our entries showcase those strengths.
A tremendous (and ongoing) project this year was our BigMoneySF series, which mapped out a byzantine network of interrelated donors, nonprofits, political candidates, and others who have over the last four years dominated San Francisco’s politics. Our series was interactive, allowing users to search for individuals by name to see exactly how they fit into this big money network. The project was lauded by Robert Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit (who praised us in a similar piece written the same day), and many others. It was so comprehensive that the Guardian embedded it into their own, separate piece.
The same interactivity was true of our entry for the Dolores Park hill bomb, a skateboarding event that was shut down by police in the biggest mass arrest of teenagers in San Francisco in years. Our scrollytelling visual gave readers an hour-by-hour understanding of an event that rocked their neighborhood (and showed how police may have violated their own department’s policies).
Our entry on the San Francisco budget was similarly an attempt to elucidate the typically-opaque inner workings of city government; the city’s former controller, Ed Harrington, went so far as to comment on the piece, writing that he was “completely impressed … You have taken an almost incomprehensible set of information and made it meaningful.”
We attempted the same with a piece allowing readers to enter their ballot picks from the March primary and see just how much was being spent on their votes, and our entry on San Francisco’s toilet paper spending is submitted as a typical column for us — one that mixes interesting visualizations, data, and the institutional knowledge of San Francisco that we thrive on.
This year, as we turn towards election coverage, we are interacting with readers much more: We host weekly coffees as part of our “Meet the Candidates” series, in which we ask a question a week for district supervisors (and we advertise those coffee chats within our pieces and social media); we ask readers to tell us what they want to know from their candidates on our one-stop shop elections dashboard; and we are meeting readers regularly by hosting mayoral forums with all the major candidates.
As always, we frequently use Instagram and Twitter to reach out to readers and sources, picking up tips and feedback. We continue to outreach to monolingual Spanish speakers via an SMS service, and we translate pieces into Chinese and Spanish.
This small team has produced impressive, experimental, interactive journalism that is easy to digest and packed with facts. They are training the next generation and doing a terrific job of it.
