Mission Local’s Coverage

Housing coverage:

• Our series on public housing in Potrero Hill prompted several city supervisors to lambast the company’s performance and helped our intern at the time win a “Community Journalism” award from SPJ Norcal.
  • “Potrero, Sunnydale public housing mismanaged by private firm, report says”
  • “On Potrero Hill, squatters get scammed. So do landlords.”
• Our two-part series on low-income housing in the Bayview, the city’s historically Black neighborhood helped our reporter nab the “Outstanding Emerging Journalist” award from SPJ NorCal in 2023.
  • “Part I: Life on The Hill – where leaks, roaches and rats take months to abate”
  • “Part II: Multibillion-dollar company delays Hunters Point housing renovation, cites lack of funds”

City coverage:

• Our award-winning series on “San Francisco’s bizarre and costly quest for the perfect trash can netted us an Institute for Nonprofit News award on explanatory journalism.
• A quick turn-around obituary on the victim of a brazen daylight shooting in the Mission: “Alberto Vargas Quero, Mission shooting victim, arrived in San Francisco last Wednesday. By Friday, he was dead.” It is representative of our stories dealing with gun violence.
• Our breaking news story on the largest mass arrest of teenagers in San Francisco in at least seven years, “SFPD shuts down Dolores Park hill bomb, arresting dozens of teens” spawned more than a dozen follow-ups and made us a finalist for a California Journalism Award for breaking news.
• Our sports coverage on a local taqueria’s soccer team, winning a big upset against a pro team: “BURRITOOOOOOOAL! El Farolito team beats Major League Soccer affiliate.”
• Our dive into the history of Nima Momeni, the prime suspect in the stabbing death of CashApp founder Bob Lee: “Nima Momeni’s life unraveled in years before killing.”

Tech coverage:

Much of our tech coverage has been from the bottom-up, particularly looking at gig workers’ daily lives driving for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and others:

• “The app always wins: a DoorDash driver’s quixotic quest for $14.28 an hour”
• “‘All up for work:’ Immigrant Uber and Lyft drivers create communities that others envy”
• “Uber drivers, fearing danger, drive armed”
• “Facing a driverless-car future, Uber & Lyft drivers shrug: ‘It’s bound to happen’”
• “As rideshare prices skyrocket, Uber and Lyft take a bigger piece of riders’ payments” (a story that prompted Uber to change its policies)

Election coverage:

• Our November 2024 elections dashboard with all our election-related coverage
• Our “Meet the Candidates” series of weekly questions for all contested supervisorial races in the city: Districts 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 
• Our special BigMoneySF project, in particular our map of the big money network, our follow-up on the biggest player in that network, and our explainer on how political giving and the tax code intersect
• Our “See How They Run” series of daily dispatches from the major mayoral campaigns
• Our recent stories on campaign finance
• Our interactive ballot for the March primary, where voters could fill in a sample ballot on our site and see just how much was spent on campaigns for their votes
• Our post-election breakdown maps out how every precinct in the city voted on measures and candidates

Data journalism:

• Our “Explore your neighborhood in data” interactive allows readers to toggle datasets like crime, race, and household income to see how each trait varies across the city
• Our 2023-2025 budget explorer lets readers see how the budgets of every department and program will change, and how much of the budget is in the hands of the mayor and Board of Supervisors (a hot-button issue in the city)
  • Ed Harrington, San Francisco’s longtime former city controller, left this comment on the piece: “I am completely impressed. You have taken an almost incomprehensible set of information and made it meaningful.”
• Our database of every person killed in a police shooting in San Francisco since 2000, with portraits of most and information about each incident
• Our interactive visualizing all $70 million in law enforcement misconduct settlements in San Francisco since 2010, making thousands of documents of misconduct cases available for public view for the first time ever
• Our map of the Mission shows a novel response to homeless encampments: More than 2,000 sidewalk planters
• Our hour-by-hour breakdown of the Dolores Park hill bomb
• Our interactive on the dozens of instances of Cruise vehicles interfering with emergency crews, like firefighters and policy

Columns:

Mission Local’s Managing Editor Joe Eskenazi is considered the finest columnist in San Francisco. His events generally sell out and he has also proven to be an incredible role model for the young journalists we train. 

A few of his columns:

• “Bob Lee deserved better than to be killed — and then co-opted in death” — on the stabbing death of CashApp co-founder Bob Lee, and the instantaneous and uninformed reaction blaming it on street lawlessness (incorrectly, as it turned out: Eskenazi also broke the news a week later naming the prime suspect)
• “Real SF dystopia: Two Black men fighting to the death over Walgreens snacks — on the killing of Banko Brown, a Black transgender man, by a Black Walgreens security guard who also struggled with poverty
• “If ‘compassion is killing people’ in SF, the city may give cruelty a shot” — on Mayor London Breed’s new tough-on-crime stance