In this edition of We Mean Business: “How They Did It,” Ananya Bhargava talks to Brontë Wittpenn about her recent award-winning coverage on the systemic use of a flawed estimator tool, 360Value, that leaves homeowners drastically underinsured. “Burned” 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.
Wittpenn traveled to wildfire-hit communities several times, capturing photos and videos and talking directly with families who were navigating the fallout of underinsurance. Her visual reporting helped show the devastation in a way that words alone can’t, making the impact of the investigation feel more real and immediate for readers. I am here with Brontë Wittpenn to learn more about how they did it.
Brontë Wittpenn: My name is Brontë Wittpenn. I’m a photojournalist with the San Francisco Chronicle. My background is not as traditional. I guess you could say I’m kind of like a Swiss Army knife of journalism. Not only do I write, but I do video, documentary, storytelling and photojournalism as well. So my role is basically to take investigative stories and elevate those voices visually, to make people connect with the folks that we interview and to connect on the topics that we investigate.
Bhargava: Just going back to the beginning of the investigation, I’d love to learn how you learned about the issue, and then also what inspired you to then pursue this investigation.
Wittpenn: It’s interesting how this all came about, because I moved to the Bay Area from Austin, Texas in 2021. Accepting a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, I knew that the staff, both the visual side and the reporting side, is nationally known for their wildfire coverage. So I knew going in that this would probably be something that I would eventually be faced with, and that is covering stories about people and communities impacted by fires. And my first wildfire was the Caldor fire in the fall of 2021 and that was my first California wildfire, and my first time covering any sort of fire in general throughout my 10-year career as a photojournalist. So when I was there, I did notice that a lot of the talk locally was about how the town of Grizzly Flats had been mostly destroyed, and that no news coverage was really focusing on that very small, very rural community. And so right away, I told my editors that this was something that I wanted to pursue. This was an area that I wanted to focus on. And so I did what I usually do, is start looking for, researching, finding anybody that is from the area. And I was able to get in contact with several families who had been evacuated via Twitter, which is now X, through Facebook, and so I was making contacts directly in that way.
And long story long, and how I’m trying to connect this is I had photographed someone in 2021, a woman named Jennifer, who had actually been evacuated and her home was destroyed. And who knew that several years later, four years later, Jennifer would actually be the center of our investigation, and this was even before I really knew who Megan and Susie were. And so when they told me that there’s a woman, Jennifer, that is at the center of it all, I remember thinking like that name sounds super familiar. And then I remember looking through my images, four years ago, and she was in there. And so I had already established a connection with this community. I had already been there when it was burning. I was there after it burned. I was there when people were showing up and just learning that their houses were gone and that everything that they worked for was gone. So I would say that before we even had an investigation, I was already really close with this community, and I had already established trust and contacts, and I think that by my doing that in 2021 it really helped make our investigation really rooted in community and really rooted in people being able to see themselves in the coverage, especially if you’re living in California. So that’s how I got involved, and it really just took off from there, especially when the fires in Los Angeles hit.
Bhargava: When I talked to Susie and Megan, they mentioned how you visited Grizzly Flats quite often. How did spending that much time really shaped the way you told the story?
Wittpenn: I think what separates good journalists from great journalists is the ability to be able to show up and show up often, and be very intentional and honest and transparent about why we’re there. I would say that because I was there during the fire, I was there when the evacuation orders were lifted and the residents were able to return, I was there for community events, when the Red Cross was there distributing first aid kits, or, evacuation kits, things that people were needing at that time that they were learning that their homes were gone. I was there for food distribution lines. The community of Grizzly Flats knows who I am, and they saw me often. And so I think again, that was a huge reason why we were able to do the work that we were able to do, because the Chronicle had already built those inroads of trust. The Chronicle had made themselves present in the community of Grizzly Flats, especially at a time when the news media moved on. When the Caldor fire was done, it wasn’t burning anymore, the residents returned to South Lake Tahoe, mostly national media went on to the next news story, but I remained. And so when we talk about under insurance and we talk about wildfires, I think that’s what separated our coverage from a lot of other coverage.
Bhargava: I’d love to learn what the main challenges were that you faced during the investigation and reporting process, especially as a visual journalist, this is such a document forward investigation, so how do you really tell that story visually?
Wittpenn: A lot of what we were talking about, Caldor fire, the Lightning Complex Fire, the Paradise fire. A lot of these fires had already happened. A lot of these stories were in the past. So how do you visually bring those stories to the present? That was a major challenge for me was, how do I bring these things that had already happened and make people care about them again? That’s something that visual journalists have to deal with all the time. A lot of stories, especially investigations, we find out about the thing after the thing happened, and that’s why we’re investigating it, right? And so for reporters, it’s a little different. You can write a scene. You can describe a scene that happened 8-10 years ago. We don’t get that. We have to come up with creative ways to be able to bring people back to 2021 and then bring them back to 2025. The ways in which I did that were the use of archive imagery, the use of footage that was taken at that time, but also it was using audio, using their voices to describe a scene like, maybe, for example, maybe they’re describing like the warmth of their home and the beauty of their home, but you’re also pairing it with like that their home is no longer there. Maybe you’re using audio of like children laughing and describing what the yard used to look like and how rich and wonderful and colorful walls, but you’re seeing just like scorched earth, trying to bring elements of emotion with what we’re seeing now, to give a sense of loss.
And so that was kind of how I tried to work with those kind of visual elements and ways of storytelling that can’t be done with a pen and paper. So that was one thing. And the major thing was we had already been working on this investigation. We had slated to publish it in the beginning of the year of 2025, and that all was ruptured when the Los Angeles fires happened. So I had already been working and producing this short doc. I was halfway through the doc when we were told about LA. So not only did I have to completely rework the timeline of that video, what was my lead in that video became the middle part of my video because my team, my editors, we decided that this video needed to lead with LA and folks that were impacted by the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Literally having to rework and deconstruct and redo the entire thing was a massive challenge. And not only that, I was sent to LA to cover it as a news story. Not only was I covering LA for the investigation, but I was also covering LA for our daily news coverage, and to be informing our readership what was happening, I had to really pivot back and forth from daily news coverage and making daily deadlines to also be looking for people and scenes and situations that would later go into our investigation. So it was an incredibly challenging time, not only because I went to LA multiple times to do both things, so physically and emotionally, it was very challenging to do it all. I was very much emotionally in tune with folks that were dealing with things that happened in the past, while also simultaneously being very in tune with the people that are experiencing everything in real time. So emotionally, it was a roller coaster for me as well, but also it was an example of the limbo that people who are victims to this go through. So I felt the limbo that people that are impacted by wildfires go through every day for years, and what I felt was a very small portion of what these families are feeling every single day.
Bhargava: Was there anything about the experience that really surprised you, or changed how you think about covering disasters or systemic issues like this?
Wittpenn: When a disaster happens, impacts of that, the trauma is really felt in the moment that the disaster is happening, but the trauma changes forms into other things years and years and years after that. I feel that people see a wildfire on social media and the news. They’re watching people’s homes burn down. It only gets worse after that. It’s not only experiencing that deep loss of something that you’ve built, you’ve worked your entire life to buy a piece of land and put a home on it. To see that gone, I feel like that’s only the tip of the iceberg. After that, they’re navigating insurance, navigating all these forms. They’re navigating health impacts. From that, they’re navigating like so much more after that, that a disaster is not just an isolated event. A disaster can last for generations. That to me, I had a moment of “it doesn’t end here.” Actually, it’s just beginning. And for a lot of families, disasters just continues and continues. When we’re talking about insurance and we’re talking about big companies, it’s not dollars and cents, when these companies are putting a price on what it takes to rebuild and they’re undervaluing that number, that has an impact on people. Our investigation is important because what we’re talking about has a human cost.
Bhargava: You did touch on, already, the importance of investigative journalism. So would you like to talk a bit more about why it’s so important, and also what role emotion and empathy really plays into that?
Wittpenn: Now more than ever, we need investigative journalists. We need people to be asking questions. We need people to be the watchdog for society. Because if that goes away, then what? And that’s something I think about all the time, is like, it doesn’t matter what you think. We still need this service, this public service, and especially at a time where public services, things for the public, for the people are being taken away or not being funded, or mass layoffs. We need people to be asking questions. So when I go into a situation that is probably going to have high trauma, I have to remember that my job is to report on what’s happening and is to get the information that I need to inform our viewers and our readership in the story, but also to be a human too, and also realize that what people are going through is very human, and that if I go into a situation acting like “And what’s your name?,” and you know that’s gonna be met with a very human response, and most of that is like, “Get out of my face.” We would respect that if someone says no, that’s a no. And so for me, like I have to remember I’m not an advocate. There’s other people doing that job better than me, and so my job is to go in and ask the questions that are going to elevate their voices and elevate the story so that they can tell their story. Our job is to literally be a sponge, be a fly on the wall, but also elevate voices that are going through very real, very human things that impact us all.
[Outro music]
Bhargava: That was San Francisco Chronicle’s Brontë Wittpenn, who is one of the Gold winners of the 2025 Barlett and Steele Regional and Local category. To everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. For more information on the awards visit our website businessjournalsim.org.
