Julian Mark, Mission Local reporter on police reform, named outstanding emerging journalist

Julian Mark was named today as the outstanding emerging journalist for 2020 by the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California.

Mark, who grew up in the East Bay, began as a freelancer for Mission Local in 2015 and became a full-time reporter in August, 2017. 

He’s a marvel to have at the office — quick, conscientious, and alert to the possibilities of a good tale.  

“Julian is tireless and driven and talented, and just a hell of a reporter and colleague,” said managing editor Joe Eskenazi. “This is a well-deserved recognition of what we all already knew.” 

Mark has covered every possible daily story with curiosity, tenacity, and intelligence, we wrote in the nominating letter. What his editors most appreciate is his “ability to see those stories in a long news cycle or beat that others miss; stories that give texture to a running story or offer a deep dive on his beat.”

Some examples: Apocalypse Chic: Valencia Street businesses board up their windows and Love in the Time of Covid ‘Not having sex is definitely frustrating.’ The two stories were repeated by dozens of other publications, but Mark saw them early in the pandemic. 

Over the last couple of years, Mark has developed a beat covering police reform in San Francisco. By going to the meetings that few journalists attend, he’s delivered deep, informed, and important coverage. 

Anatomy of a police shooting: The chaotic last moments of Jesus Delgado Duarte,  is a masterfully told story about the chaos among the police officers at the scene. 

Delgado had a decision to make. He could get out of the trunk and face time in prison — and possibly be deported to Mexico, where he had been born 19 years earlier. Or he could raise his gun and die. 

He looked toward Officer Milen Banegas, who was giving him commands in Spanish less than 10 feet away. “You could see all these emotions that he was experiencing,” she would tell homicide detectives days later. “At one point, it looked like he was crying.” 

Delgado made the sign of the cross, she recalled. It was “as if he’s having this psychotic episode … it’s like, he was trying to decide what to do.” 

All of a sudden, that decision would become easier. An officer standing behind Banegas and to her left shot Delgado with a beanbag round, hitting him in the right forearm. Many of the 10 officers who shot Delgado would tell detectives that Delgado winced, flinched, or was unresponsive. But Banegas, who was among the closest, recalled something more: Delgado’s facial expression turned to “rage.”

His range is exactly what a daily news site requires.  In August, 2019, he wrote Homeless poet and bird lover John ‘Swan’ Ratliff is back on the street — and suffering, a closely reported story illustrating how mental illness can upend the best of intentions. 

A public official found a room for Ratliff, who lives to feed the pigeons, and Julian wrote, “Swan” got thrown out for “being himself”. 

“He kept throwing things out the window and feeding the birds,” said the employee who did not give a name. …

Ratliff, when asked, agreed. 

But even Ratliff knew he had not helped himself.

“Then my legs went bad again,” he said. 

He lifted the cuffs of his pants and showed me his legs. They were raw and covered in green pus. They had grown worse since being kicked out of his room, he said, as had his general health. 

Mark is a graduate of Humboldt State University and has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The East Bay Express, and the San Francisco Business Times.