Local Heroes

When the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on May 6, the recipient of the Breaking News Reporting award—Lookout Santa Cruz, a digital-only media outlet launched in November 2020—made headlines for its underdog triumph. Its 14-person staff, including general assignment reporter Max Chun ’19, beat out the Los Angeles Times (with 52 Pulitzers to its name) to earn the Pulitzer for its “detailed and nimble community-focused coverage” of the catastrophic floods and mudslides that displaced thousands of Santa Cruz residents in January 2023.

The honor was heralded as a much-needed national recognition of the importance of local, community-focused news outlets, which have steadily dwindled over the last two decades due to budget cuts, corporate consolidations, and an increasing reliance on social media for information. But Lookout staff hadn’t expected this level of acknowledgment—least of all Chun, whose interest in journalism had blossomed just six years earlier.

“Funnily enough, I didn’t strongly consider journalism as a path until my later years at Oxy,” says Chun, who chose to attend Occidental for its small class sizes and Los Angeles location, majored in politics, and originally planned to pursue a career in community organizing. But in summer 2018, he interned with the documentary organization Brave New Films, where he created and curated online content to raise awareness of social and political issues. He also “started to pay closer attention to how information is disseminated and the role it plays in shaping our understanding of the world.”

As a senior at Oxy, Chun took two journalism courses with former Los Angeles Times journalist and fellow Pulitzer recipient Robert Sipchen, who has taught in the College Writing Program since 1997. Those classes, which focused on news writing and narrative nonfiction, allowed Chun to explore the more enjoyable and rewarding aspects of storytelling, and Sipchen’s hands-on approach provided him with the skills needed to report on a developing natural disaster four years later.

“I learned to be direct and persistent, but respectful,” Chun says. “Having studied both news writing and narrative nonfiction gave me the tools to decide whether to approach a story from a hard news perspective or to explore the more human elements.”

After graduation, Chun returned to his hometown of Santa Cruz, where he worked as a barista until, less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down community spaces all over the world. In August 2021, he was offered a position at Lookout. Like Chun, the publication was in the initial stages of figuring out its journalistic path: Having launched only nine months before, Lookout Santa Cruz was the inaugural member of what is now Lookout Local, a network of mobile-first media outlets offering news and resources specific to their communities.

“One of the biggest challenges was forming an identity as an organization,” Chun says of those early days. “We experimented with different kinds of features, columns, and styles to see what got the best response. Although that forced me to approach stories from angles I hadn’t previously considered, it broadened my horizons in a way that I think has served me well as my experience has grown.”

And Chun’s experience has grown quickly. In Lookout’s first few months of operation, he learned how to build websites and navigate content management systems. When the first round of COVID-19 vaccines became widely available shortly after the publication’s launch, Chun became its “first home-grown local reporter,” per his Lookout profile. The fact that he was born and raised in Santa Cruz gave him a built-in familiarity with the community he was covering—but the city he’d known as a high schooler looked different when seen through a journalist’s eyes.

“Working as a reporter changes your view of a place,” he says. “You find out so much more about the main players, political dynamics, and behind-the-scenes operations of a jurisdiction that you otherwise wouldn’t have known. If anything, reporting on my hometown has highlighted that there is always room to learn.”

As the Lookout staff established itself over the next year and a half, Chun began covering the city’s more longstanding major issues, such as population growth, housing, and homelessness—he’s particularly proud of a pair of stories that highlighted the plights of Santa Cruz residents faced with difficult, unaffordable housing choices due to land development decisions and expiring agreements with the city. And, although COVID variants continued to make news, the media’s hyperfocus on an immediate, widespread emergency ebbed.

Then the storms came.

By January 2023, Santa Cruz County had already endured its share of recent, devastating natural disasters. In August 2020, dry lightning sparked the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire, which destroyed 911 homes, prompted evacuations, and ravaged nearby Big Basin State Park. From late December 2022 through mid-January 2023, nine atmospheric rivers pummeled the coast. The bomb cyclone that made landfall in Santa Cruz on January 4 was the second winter storm to batter the city in less than a week, after unexpected heavy rainfall that began on New Year’s Eve.

To cover the 445 square miles of county impacted by the deluge—much of it weather-damaged or inaccessible—Lookout’s staff had, at that time, six reporters, one photographer, an assignment editor, and a copy editor.

Chun juggled multiple responsibilities. He called the county’s cities and government officials for preparation information, monitored updates from the National Weather Service, and managed electronic correspondence with Lookout readership, sending emails and texts with links to the publication’s stories. This last duty proved vital to Santa Cruz community members looking for the latest news on evacuation orders, emergency shelters, road closures, power outages, and structural damages.

“We had many readers tell us that this was the only information they could get,” he says, noting that his sources included not only officials and government agencies but also residents whose stories about their upended lives might otherwise go unheard. “That balance between the official word and the lived experience of Santa Cruzans during a historic event was crucial in understanding and conveying the gravity of the situation.”

After the atmospheric rivers subsided, Chun shifted his focus to the city’s recovery efforts. By the end of January, although evacuation orders had lifted, power had been restored, and many roads had reopened, the storms’ effects continued to impact the county—and still do, exacerbated by subsequent weather events. The city’s scenic coastal road, West Cliff Drive, was partially eroded during the storm’s onslaught and sections of the drive remain closed.

Massive landslides in the Santa Cruz Mountains blocked portions of Highway 9, the primary—and sometimes only—route between the Santa Cruz Mountain communities and the rest of the county, impeding workers’ commutes. More than a year later, some roads to mountain residents’ homes remain undriveable. All told, the cyclone bomb was the region’s worst storm in 41 years, damaging approximately 1,000 homes and businesses and causing more than $240 million in infrastructure damage.

Lookout has covered it all. From January 3 to January 17, the outlet published 83 staff-written stories, provided 86 updates to its storm liveblog, and shared 30 emails and texts with its readership; in the storm’s aftermath, it shared dozens more. Six of those stories, including the liveblog, were listed in the Pulitzer Prizes’ profile of Lookout’s winning work.

But Chun is proudest of the publication’s ability to provide the diverse Santa Cruz community with vital information from a trusted and familiar source during a time of crisis.

“Awards like these are a huge honor,” he says. “But above all, it is an affirmation that my colleagues and I met the moment and looked out for our community when it needed us. Wherever life takes me, that will always be my ultimate goal.”