In this edition of We Mean Business: “How They Did It,” Ananya Bhargava interviews Megan Fan Munce and Susie Neilson about their recent award-winning investigation, “Burned.” This investigation highlights the systemic use of a flawed estimator tool, 360Value, that leaves homeowners drastically underinsured. The reporters showed that 360Value relies on outdated and incomplete data that consistently understates the actual cost of rebuilding homes, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Their series won the 2025 Gold prize in the Barlett and Steele Awards Regional/Local category. Visit the San Francisco Chronicle to read their investigation or businessjournalism.org/awards to view all the 2025 winners.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Ananya Bhargava: Welcome to a special edition of We Mean Business, where we dive into the stories behind the Barlett & Steele Award winners. Join us as we uncover the winners’ investigative processes, the challenges they conquered, and the powerful impact of their reporting. “Burned” is an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Megan Fan Munce, Susie Neilson, and Brontë Wittpenn that uncovered how the systemic use of a flawed estimator tool called 360Value, leaves homeowners drastically underinsured. The investigation found that major insurers, including State Farm, Farmers, CSAA, and USAA, have long known about the tool’s flaws and yet continue to use it to set coverage limits without informing customers, leaving fire victims unable to rebuild and slowing community recovery. I am here with Megan Fan Munce and Susie Neilson to learn more about how they did it.
Susie Neilson: My name is Susie Nielson. I am an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, and before joining the investigative team, I spent several years on the Chronicle’s data team, where I was primarily using data and coding skills to illuminate some of the bigger issues facing residents of the Bay Area, including crime and public safety and housing and health.
Megan Fan Munce: I’m Megan Fan Munce. I’m the Chronicle’s home insurance reporter, which is a unique and very niche beat, but one that we created at the Chronicle about two years ago, after recognizing that climate change influenced natural disasters were creating an insurance crisis in California that was really impacting our readers in Northern California, and wanted to dedicate a whole reporter to. So, my background comes from reporting on insurance for a long time. This is actually the first investigation or long term project I’ve worked on, but working with Susie was just an extreme pleasure, because it was an opportunity to sort of navigate how to do an investigation with the partnership of someone who had subject matter expertise and someone who was coming at it from not being delved into that, but being very deep into investigative journalism and how we could blend, sort of, those two skill sets together.
Bhargava: So, I’d love to know more about the beginnings of this investigation. So what inspired you to pursue this investigation?
Neilson: About almost exactly a year ago, I was sort of wrapping up my last long-term project, which was about deadly police pursuits, and starting to think about what I might want to do next. And I had been told by other people in the newsroom that I should try and work with Megan at some point, just because she’s brilliant, and people kind of knew that she was also thinking about stories in more accountability-focused ways. And so I had that at the back of my mind. Just one random day in the newsroom, I happened upon a story about, I believe it was Hurricane Helene, and looking at how homeowners following Hurricane Helene had dealt with fraud committed by their insurance companies that lowballed them on their payments. And I reached out to Megan, and I was like, “Do you think that something like this could be happening in California, you know, with all the wildfires?” and Megan said, “You know, I don’t know, but maybe let’s email the Department of Insurance and start asking them questions about this.” And basically, the Department of Insurance emailed Megan back a link to this trove of records called their market conduct exam reports, which is basically all of the investigations that they’ve done into insurance companies over the years. And Megan and I were really interested in a different, totally unrelated story about State Farm. So we started looking at this exam into State Farm, and that’s when we first encountered the word “360Value,” which set us off on this path that later became the story.
Munce: We talk a lot with this investigation being a problem that was just under the surface, but that no one has dug into. If you go back to any reporting about prior wildfires in California, there’s always mentions of under-insurance, but no one had really dug into the reasons why. And so it’s really illustrative for me that the way we found this was one email to the Department of Insurance that said, “If you investigate an insurance company, where do those investigative records live?” And it wasn’t that we had to records request something. It wasn’t that we had to develop some kind of internal source at the department who would give us this. It was literally just a link on their website where these hundreds and hundreds of pages about this lived, and then Susie and I sat on the couches in our newsroom just reading through these dozens of 40-page documents. And I think at first we were looking for something that was very glaringly wrong about this process, something that was clearly fraud. And what we instead came up with was this very complex system of how insurance companies were valuing houses that had burned down prior to them burning down when they were setting coverage limits, and came upon this phenomenon that was there all along, but that no one had really dug into before.
Neilson: One thing that was also really interesting about this process was when we finally grasped what the problem is, and we realized it might not be like criminal fraud, but it was just as, if not more, impactful to such a big group of people. It’s this very systemic flaw in how insurers work, and we had kind of come up with this working hypothesis within a few days. And then the way that these projects work at the Chronicle is you usually write an initial memo for your editors outlining what you think the story is, what the minimum story is, what the maximum possible story is, kinds of people you might talk to, documents you might request. And when we first pitched this story, one of our editors actually didn’t believe that this was happening, because they thought that there was no way that insurance companies would sell people less insurance coverage. They were like, why would they do that? Insurance companies want to charge people more. And so we had to spend a couple of days, like, really solidifying why that would happen, and it was thanks to Megan’s really deep sourcing already that we were able to move pretty quickly on this story.
Bhargava: So you already talked about some of the sources that you used in the investigation, and you mentioned how you sort of formulated your hypothesis really quickly. So now my question is, what methods did you use to test that hypothesis, and how did you verify the credibility of your sources?
Munce: I think one thing we started off with was speaking with a lot of different lawyers, and lawyers can be tricky sources, because they also have a financial interest in this. And so what it came down for us was not just trusting what the lawyer said, but what documentation they had. And a real breakthrough for us on this story was when Susie was searching for lawsuits, and she found this one lawsuit that we talk about in the story where the lawyers for the insurance company, Farmers Insurance Group, had failed to meet a deadline to seal the documents that were turned over in the case. The case itself was not successful, which is usually maybe a sign when you’re reporting something that you might not be on the wrong track, but what it did successfully do was make this 800-page trove of documents public because these lawyers had forgotten to ask for the judge to reseal them after the case was dismissed, and those documents really spoke for themselves in terms of what this problem was and the fact that it wasn’t just a coincidence or a consequence of misaligned incentives, but was something that insurance companies were aware that was happening and had even at points in the past, investigated potential solutions to, but had not fallen through with. So I think that was one big way that we were able to confirm that what we were seeing happen anecdotally was truly happening behind the scenes as well.
Otherwise, with a story like this, it was really difficult, because part of the story is that insurance companies don’t give their homeowners any transparency into how this process works, and especially when you’re dealing with wildfire victims from several years ago. Many of them, their documents burned down in the fire. Others had their documents, but had since lost them, because they’ve been moving around and because it had been several years. And so getting the documents to prove that these homeowners did go through this process that we knew existed was really the hard part for us.
Neilson: When we first heard about this and we learned about underinsurance, we started looking for communities we could maybe visit who had been harmed by underinsurance. And we settled first on this town called Grizzly Flats, or it’s not even a town. It’s like an unincorporated, it’s like a community, a mountain community, up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. And most of the community had burned down in 2021 with the Caldor Fire. And we just drove up there with one of our photographers, Brontë Wittpenn, and we basically spent four days talking to as many people as possible and working with them to try and figure out where their documents might be. And it was really difficult because many of them were deeply underinsured, but like Megan said, they didn’t have their documents.
And we basically spent four days going from house to house, trailer to trailer, community center to community center looking for people, until we finally were able to find a couple that had meticulously documented what happened to them, and they ended up being the Salazar family, which is in this story, they had really done everything right. They had upped their coverage limits before, they had tried to get the best policy possible, and they were still underinsured by something like 40% and were unable to rebuild their home. And when we asked Farmers about it, they said they denied a request to up their coverage. But then they said that that was in 2022 after their house had burned down. So like, of course, you’re not gonna up your coverage when your house is burned down.
Munce: One thing that we like to say in our interviews, that we do about this, because we weren’t able to put it in the story, is that, as we mentioned, we spent the whole time reporting really challenged by the lack of documentation coming from the fact that insurance companies do not regularly provide these reports to homeowners that are generated by the algorithm that they’re using. And our homeowner, our lead character in the story, Mike Kubo, had reached out to his insurance company, State Farm General, and asked them for his reports, and he was sent back one report, which we talked about in the story, but the day after we published, State Farm sent him seven new reports, and he learned that his insurance agent had run the algorithm on his house seven different times, changing things about the home each time, just like we described some agents do in the story, and had initially given him the lowest estimate that he had generated, and then when this homeowner continued to press for more information, started giving him higher and higher estimates in line with those other estimates he was generating. And so it was a very interesting experience, because on the one hand, we regretted that we were not able to include that in the story, because it really showed how the situation we were describing and all these documents is really exactly what happened to this homeowner. But on the other hand, it was a sign of how many people this could be happening to behind the scenes because of the lack of transparency, and how many of us might have seven reports written about our houses and might be only insured for the lowest value.
Neilson: I wanted to say one more thing, though, about how you kind of validate these things. So in addition to looking for documents, you should always try and do what investigative reporters call “reporting against your story.” So one thing that Megan and I did very early on is start reaching out to people who might be willing to test our hypothesis or push back on our hypothesis. Which included insurance agents and brokers, insurance industry representatives and lobbyists, people who were invested in the tool actually working well. And despite them supposedly being invested in that, what we kept hearing from that side actually, was that, yes, the tool had a lot of problems, and the term “garbage in, garbage out,” was pretty frequently used even among insurance agents. And so we knew fairly early on that this kind of was a problem that everyone in the industry knew about. It was just something that hadn’t yet been brought out to the public or really meticulously proven.
Bhargava: And I think you mentioned in your piece that you yourself bought the subscription for 360Value. So I’d love to hear more about that, like, how did you go about using it and testing it out and seeing what’s wrong?
Neilson: Megan and I had been on a call with a public adjuster. We’d asked someone if they could show us the tool, and so they were showing us how they used it and how, you know, if they entered even a few key details wrong, or they didn’t enter enough details, 360Value would just spit out this extremely inaccurate price for a rebuild. And then at the end of that call, they said, “Oh, well, you know, you can always just buy the tool yourselves and play around with it on your own.” And it hadn’t even occurred to us until then, I think. But then me and Megan purchased a subscription to 360Value, which is very easy. You can just do it online, and then we started running different addresses of California homeowners we knew into the software. And from that, it was fairly straightforward, just because we were getting amounts that were clearly – just based on basic human understanding of what it costs to live in California – far too low. I think Megan’s childhood home. I think the rebuild cost was what, like $190 a square foot, which like easily underselling by $300 a square foot or something. So we knew pretty early on from our use that what we were finding in the documents was also backed up by the tool now, like how it was working now.
Munce: Yeah, and I think one thing that was important for us is even though we had bought the tool ourselves and we had been able to witness the errors that it was making ourselves, both in like Susie said, underestimating the cost of rebuilding in California communities where rebuilding is very expensive, but also making errors, like saying a house was only one story when it was really two stories, or saying that it was built out of a different type of material, or had a different type of roof than it actually did. All of the actual reports that we cite in the story are reports that were done by insurance agents who are supposed to be the experts in this software, in this process. So we talk about one that was done on the homeowner we opened the store with, Mike Kubo, and how several years after his home burned down, the 360Value tool was still populating information about his newly rebuilt house, but it was actually showing him information about the house that burned down and was basing the price based off of that. And then we talk about some other examples where insurance agents actually walked us through the tool for instances that came up in government investigations where they reviewed work that agents had done. And so while we tried our best to become experts in this tool to make our reporting really airtight and unimpeachable by the insurance industry, we made sure that every time that we were actually reporting off of this tool, an expert had been using it, and that the reporting that we were doing couldn’t be chalked up to, well, you two reporters used this tool wrong. It was that the people who were supposed to be the experts in this tool were also making these mistakes.
Bhargava: I know you jumped into a lot of those technical details regarding the tool. So how did you balance reporting that with reporting on the families and communities actually affected by the wildfires. So how did you balance that technical versus community aspect?
Munce: I think this is something I really love about working in local or regional news, is that you might imagine that if an industry publication had approached this project, they might start with the really technical details and start with the industry dynamics and the financial incentives that are relevant to an industry publication. But as a local and regional news publication, we really start with the people. And so like Susie mentioned, before we had even found any of these documents or had dug into how the algorithm worked or why insurance companies might be doing this, we drove a couple of hours north to the community of Grizzly Flats, and just spent several days talking with them. And that really grounded us, because I think even today, Susie and I are continuing to report this story. We just came back from a trip to Los Angeles a few weeks ago. And every time when you talk to a wildfire survivor, the impact of what they’re going through and what you’re reporting on really shines through, and that is a guiding light with how to approach these stories.
I think, as someone who does report in the industry, it is really fascinating for me to think about the financial incentives and the market mechanisms that are influencing why this problem exists, and that’s imbued in the story as well. But when you speak with homeowners, that is really where you get to where the heart of a story is, and where you can empathize with the reader too and think about the average reader that reads the San Francisco Chronicle is not coming to us to understand market dynamics of the insurance industry, but is coming to understand their community and the people around them. And so grounding our story in those people that were affected by this was not only showing the impact to leaders and officials that we hope read the story, but also showing our readers how this is affecting the people around them.
Neilson: From a really technical standpoint, one thing I think about a lot as an investigative reporter is you’re trying to do so many things in these stories. You’re trying to paint these really vivid pictures of harm and the impact of a flawed system on a person. You’re trying to point at who is responsible and how everything came to be, you’re trying to explain how something really works. And I think one thing that draws me to a project is getting the opportunity to dig deep into something like this, to really figure out how it works. And then when you’re done with all your reporting, you just want to put everything on the page. And the editing process, right, is about how to figure out what your readers actually want to read versus what was just important for you to know. And so in the editing process, something I like to think about a lot in the structuring of these stories, is something that a previous editor taught me, which is, you have to space out what they call the vegetables of the story, which is, like the details that you need to know that are important that explain how it works, the technical flaws of 360Value. But you want to intersperse those throughout the story and have what you know, maybe the dessert of the story, which is like the stories of the real people that keep you reading. And you want to keep descriptions of things pithy, short, as much as possible bring the focus back to what keeps the story moving. I think this story, when we first turned it in, was like at least 4000 words longer than it turned out to be, and it was still like 7000 words. But luckily, you know, Brontë’s documentary that accompanied the story, because it’s mostly focused on the stories of humans that are dealing with underinsurance, it was our way of condensing that part into a really immersive and watchable part of the story for people so they could kind of choose their own adventure.
Bhargava: You briefly talked about some of the challenges that you faced during your investigation, but I’d love to know any specific stories or any main challenges you faced either during the investigation or the reporting process.
Munce: I think one for me being a beat reporter, was that at the end of the day, we were going to publish this story that exposed a major flaw in the insurance industry that was harming thousands of homeowners, and then the next day I was going to have to keep reporting on that industry and calling my same sources from within insurance companies and relying on them to do my reporting and do my job and do what I think the Chronicle has really excelled at, which is bringing exclusive information to readers about the industry. A big challenge for me was navigating how to be as fair as possible, so that after the story published, and I went back to reporting on the industry as normal and speaking to those sources as normal, that there was no opportunity for them to say, “Well, we’re not going to speak to you anymore, because we feel like you misrepresented us in this story.”
I think that that was really helpful for us. Like Susie mentioned there are when we first started reporting this story, there were a lot of questions about why insurance companies would want to do this, if this was really true. There was a lot of people within the industry saying, well, it’s actually homeowners that are at fault here, and they’re just not telling you that, or they just don’t realize how they’re at fault. And so balancing the what we knew to be true, which was that the insurance industry was using a tool that it had evidence was performing in a way that was leaving many homeowners underinsured, and that, to date, had not fixed this problem or stopped using this tool or sought solutions, while also balancing the realities that an insurance company faces in that at the end of the day, homeowners play a large role in determining what coverage they buy. There are many homeowners that are just trying to get the policy they can afford, and not necessarily the policy that will protect their home to the fullest extent. In short, basically how to write a story that was going to be critical of the insurance industry and to point out what consumer advocates and what homeowners felt was a failing of the insurance industry responsibility to its policyholders, while also doing so in a way that wasn’t going to alienate the industry for us and make it so that we couldn’t continue reporting on them in a thoughtful way was a huge challenge for me.
Neilson: One of the big challenges we faced was we were three months into reporting this story, when the Los Angeles wildfires happened, and so when we first started reporting this story, we thought we were reporting on previous fires and what they would mean to future fires. And suddenly we were in the midst of reporting a story on a wildfire that was happening as we were telling the story, as we were calling people. And we knew from the very first days of that fire that likely there would be immense levels of underinsurance that surfaced from those fires, and so we felt a duty to publish this story as quickly as possible, and for the survivors of this fire and for the advocates that are working in the fire, but at the same time, these stories always take a lot of time, because you have to go through so many due diligence processes. You have to do everything that Megan was saying, you know, report against the story, make sure every side is included and given a fair chance to share their perspective. We go through a very extensive lawyering process at the Chronicle, where we work with attorneys to make sure that the story is legally sound. And so we published in April. We were probably going to publish months later if that had not been the case, and so we had to really accelerate our reporting. But I think in the end, we’re proud of the product, and we’re very fortunate in that the spotlight put on this issue by the fires has helped the piece’s impact, which has been beyond, I think, what Megan and I had anticipated.
Bhargava: Since publishing, what kind of response have you received from readers, regulators or the insurance industry as a whole?
Munce: The week, I think, after the story published, we went on the local NPR PBS station in the Bay Area at KQED, and we were there for an hour-long show. And I think that was the first moment that it maybe hit both of us, the impact that we were having on readers, because almost every call in was someone saying, “I listened to this”, or “I read the story, and I immediately called my agent and asked about upping my insurance coverage.” And I remember at the time, we were thinking, sort of, if this is all that comes of this project, then that was an extremely rewarding situation: to get to hear that there are these people who might never have to experience this problem, will hopefully never have to deal with their homes burning down in a wildfire, but that if they did, because we wrote this, they will hopefully have a better shot at rebuilding their homes or rebuilding their financial security because they knew ahead of time what was going on. I think it also to us validated the fact that homeowners want to be fully insured, because something that we had been told over and over by representatives of the insurance industry was that homeowners were choosing cheaper policies at the expense of better coverage. And so to hear this influx of people calling in and saying, “Once I learned about how this algorithm might be undervaluing my house, I went back and I asked for more coverage” was proof that it was not a phenomenon where homeowners are just ignoring the problem and choosing cheaper policies. So that was our first really rewarding experience.
And then the second, I would say, was and we were just sort of Googling around and doing our regular due diligence on what other people were reporting about the Los Angeles wildfires and about underinsurance, and we came upon a PDF of a letter from the Vice Chair of California’s Board of Equalization, which is a state agency tasked with overseeing tax enforcement. In the letter, the Vice Chair went through the findings of our story and was calling on the board to have an investigative hearing into the roots of the issue, into this algorithm, and to how it was impacting homeowners and communities, and was making this really interesting link that I don’t think Susie and I had even made about how underinsurance, leading to people fleeing their communities and not rebuilding was going to have an impact on housing values down the line, and was eventually going to have an impact on tax revenue for municipalities and for the state. And so this was very much an issue for a state agency that is interested in tax revenue. It was not the place we were expecting impact to be coming, but it was in some ways the perfect place, because of all of these interconnected issues that result from underinsurance and a lack of rebuilding after wildfires. And so we got to drive up to Sacramento and attend that hearing in person, which was both the first time we met some of our sources in person that were testifying at that hearing, but also a really gratifying experience to get to see our work reflected in what government was interested in, and to get to see them play the role that government is supposed to play, which is taking this information that journalists bring to light and then turning to, “Well, what’s the solutions that we can put forward.”
Neilson: Following our reporting, the California Department of Insurance announced that it was forming a five-state coalition comprised of western states that would be looking into the underinsurance issue. And during that announcement, lawmakers cited our reporting into 360Value, and one of the legislators present at the hearing has talked to us extensively about how our reporting made her aware of the issue. We also heard from an independent insurance agent’s and broker’s association that they were developing curriculum for their agents on how to write people’s policies based on our reporting, using our reporting as a test case of how not to underinsure people. There’s also been a lot of different lawsuits filed by fire survivors in the Los Angeles wildfires that have cited facts that we uncovered in our reporting.
Bhargava: You both have mentioned some amazing things, like how the government can take the information journalists bring to light and actually act on it. You’ve mentioned how the beginning of this investigation was grounded on the fact that you wanted to do accountability-based reporting. So I’d just love to hear even more of your thoughts on what you think the role of investigative journalism is today.
Munce: One thing I really take away is how important it is to have the perspective of a partner like Susie, who was not just asking questions that I would feel inclined to ask as a beat reporter about what is happening, why is it happening, who’s being affected, but was pushing us to ask questions like, who is accountable for this, in terms of who is perpetuating this problem and who should theoretically be responsible for stopping this problem, but isn’t because, evidently, this problem has been allowed to continue for several decades. And so I think one thing is, as newsrooms navigate challenges with financing, with staffing, it is so incredibly important to continue employing investigative journalists who can push reporting to go that one step further. Because I think if this story had stayed at that level of this idea that many wildfire survivors are underinsured and that they aren’t able to rebuild or remove back to their communities, and even if it had maybe gone into 360Value a little bit, it wouldn’t have had the impact that it did without delving into those deep documents about what the insurance industry knew and what they were doing to stop this or to not stop this. It’s something I hope our newsroom will continue doing is pairing together people who have beat reporting experience and subject matter expertise with people who have the instincts of an investigative journalist like Susie does.
Neilson: I completely second the idea that investigative journalism not only takes a person who like me has kind of the drive towards the accountability, but also someone like Megan with the deep expertise and sourcing of a given topic. If this project has a message to newsrooms, it’s that your newsroom is full of talented young beat reporters that could jump onto an investigation and like, have a really impactful project come out of it, if they just get the time and support that they need. We’re really lucky. I feel like we were just both in the right place at the right time to pair up on this, but I think that there are plenty such partnerships, like under the surface at all these newspapers waiting to happen.
Munce: You know, if we had started reporting this story during the Los Angeles wildfires, we would have been too late to it, like Susie mentioned, it was really the fact that we had been reporting on this for months that allowed us to jump into the L.A. wildfires and ask the right questions and find the right people and continue advancing the story in terms of not just how past wildfire survivors had been affected, but how people were continuing to be affected. And the reason that we were able to do that is because we had the space to go back and say, “Let’s reexamine what happened in these communities that burned down in 2020 and 2021 and figure out how they’re doing now, four to five years later.” Many of the communities that we visited, especially communities that were more rural, like Grizzly Flats, and do have a built-out local news infrastructure, were telling us about how much news coverage they got when their fire happened, but how since then, they had really not seen reporters come back through since then.
And so I think it also speaks to the importance of investigative journalism looking backwards, to look forward. The tales that we learned from these communities and the lessons and the implications of underinsurance that we took away from them really highlighted what we thought, you know, back in January was going to happen in L.A. and what we have continued to see and has allowed us to draw strong parallels between these communities as we also talk about the story as sort of something that comes off of climate change because of how climate change is impacting the conditions that lead to these mega fires. Looking back toward these previous disaster communities and taking an investigative lens onto them is going to be a really important thing for newsrooms to do as they look to how these natural disasters might devastate future communities like L.A.
Bhargava: What advice do you have for journalism students and aspiring young investigative journalists?
Neilson: My career has been all over the place, like you know, I was a private investigator for a year. I wrote science long-form essays for a year. I’ve done all sorts of things. And I think really, it’s not about the exact decision that you make, it’s the reasoning behind the decision. And if you want to become an investigative reporter, then I would say the career decisions that you want to make, you should just ask yourself if this decision will take you a step further in that direction. And that could be like what I did my year as a private investigator taught me how to read legal documents and public records in a way that, like maybe a job in the journalism industry might not have done as well. So focusing on getting the skills and energy to do the kind of work you want to do over, maybe the title or the type of newsroom or what have you, will serve you well, at least it has served me well.
Munce: When I was in journalism school, there were a lot of my peers that knew right away they wanted to be investigative journalists, or they wanted to report on Congress, or they wanted to do national media news, and I did not know what I wanted to do, and that’s what led me to the Hearst Fellowship, which is a really excellent program where you just get to try doing a ton of things so that you can figure out what your skills and your strengths are and what type of journalist you want to be. And I think that experience was so invaluable. And even moving backwards from that, you know, working for the student paper. I think so much of journalism is just practice and in some ways, smart plagiarism of yourself. Like if you write stories over and over again, you will start to figure out what works for you and what your voice is.
Very similar to what Susie said, take opportunities that you don’t think right away you might be an ideal fit for, that you weren’t dreaming of when you were in school, and just see what you can do with those opportunities, and what type of person you might become and how they might impact you and how you might impact them, because everyone takes a different approach to reporting. If two other journalists had written this story, they might have written it very differently than Susie and I did. And so just that repetition and practice is so important. But I also think that choosing a job where you really care about what you’re doing is extremely important as well. I think something that was really impactful for this story was the communities that we were driving up to are ones that I used to go to as a kid, whether it was going up to the foothills during the wintertime to see the snow or going to summer camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where we talk about the community of Bonny Doon, where Mike Kubo lives in the story. That brings so much to your reporting as well. And so don’t just think about what you’re reporting on, what your title is, or what your beat is, but also think about the communities that you’re reporting on. And I feel so lucky to be able to report on the place that I grew up.
Neilson: When I first started to do investigative work, I had it as a goal actually, to do a business investigation. But I was very intimidated by the idea of doing that because business investigation sounds like you need to, like, become an accountant or something when in reality, having done this project, I realized now that telling a business story is like telling any other story. It’s really, again, about people. It’s about at least with investigations, it’s about harm, it’s about accountability. And you may have to change your techniques. Like Megan and I have done a lot of sourcing from private individuals rather than the government for this reporting. But the techniques and the ideas and the drive is all still the same.
Munce: Yeah, I think this story really highlights what is a good hallmark of business journalism writ large, which is that the easiest way to tell a story is to find the money. And in this case, the money was the money that homeowners did not have to rebuild their homes. And following all the way up to why didn’t they have that money and what was this algorithm that was being used to value these homes? If your goal is to make something relatable and make people interested in it – people are always interested in money and personal finance – and this is a good example of that.
Susie brought up the fact that after the L.A. wildfires, since they happened in in a community with such a spotlight on them, they became a lot more national media attention on the insurance industry and on California’s insurance crisis, which I think has been a benefit to all of us because it’s helped us not be complacent in only being the only California newspaper with a full-time insurance reporter in a non-industry publication. But the insurance industry is such a fascinating place to do business investigative journalism, because it’s a private industry that’s tasked with providing a public service to people, which is helping them recover after natural disaster. Very similar to, you know, how the health care industry functions as well. And so examining its potential failings or flaws is especially impactful in the right place for good journalism in particular, because it does play that sort of interesting role where you have these misaligned incentives of wanting this industry to provide for people, because it really is the first backstop for survivors of these disasters, but also having to acknowledge the fact that it is a private industry that has the same incentives as any other industry does, which is to make money and be profitable and so that was something that we had to tackle in this story as well, was how how to reconcile those two incentives of the industry and how in many ways, this problem that we were writing about was a perfect example of the conflict between those two interests.
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Bhargava: That was a conversation with San Francisco Chronicle reporters Megan Fan Munce and Susie Neilson, who are two of the Gold winners of the 2025 Barlett and Steele Regional and Local category. To everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. For more information on the awards visit our website businessjournalsim.org/awards.
