Good morning!

Many years ago, during a particularly big game, New York football Giants coach Bill Parcells leaned into his players with a particularly resonant message: “This is why you lift all them weights!” 

For obvious reasons, that’s the last we’re going to talk about football right now. For San Francisco’s team, the big game did not go so well. But, at Mission Local, it did: Data maven Will Jarrett on Feb. 12 published a mind-blowing interactive feature that was the culmination of months of meticulous research.

Just as he did for the (ongoing) Web of Corruption, Jarrett created a searchable database of all the big-money players disgorging boatloads of cash into this year’s political races to remake the city in an image more of their liking. Jarrett’s stunning work was included as part of a collaboration with the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper, and helped illuminate thousands of readers worldwide. 

Here at Mission Local, we’re thrilled. Instead of yet another story from an out-of-towner about doom loops and dystopia, national and international readers are getting fantastically detailed and revelatory work from a local outlet that knows the difference between 24th Street and 24th Avenue. 

It took Will Jarrett a lot of time to do this. This is not easy work. But you know what? This is why you lift all them weights. 

This is your donations at work. This is what you are enabling us to do. Please: Let us do more. Please do consider giving to Mission Local. 

Joe


 

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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.