The series “Distressed” examined the life of Juan Gabriel Torres, whose ex-girlfriend and children built this memorial near the spot in Las Cruces where he was shot to death by police officers in 2016.
We already told you in May that a journalistic project led by NMPolitics.net won a national investigative reporting award for shining light on the state of the behavioral health system in Southern New Mexico. We just received that award from the National Federation of Press Women in the mail over the weekend, along with a judge’s comments about the project.
I wanted to share the judge’s comments with you:
“Strong writing, supported by careful records reviews, national and local data, the voices of lawmakers and government officials, police, social workers and mental health care workers, researchers and subject-matter experts — all provided a framework for this timely and critically important series. The heroic participation of Micah Pearson and the ex-girlfriend of Gabe Torres were essential to put faces to the statistics and show the real-life struggle and heartbreak so many families and people with mental illnesses face. Those interviews don’t just happen. They require relational trust — between the reporters, photographers and sources — and they require lots of digging to get past the obvious and give readers the sophisticated insights they need to understand the worsening situation. Provider shortages, inadequate staffing, increased demand for services, ignorance of the impact of mental illness all contribute to the enormous challenge of addressing these problems.
“The videos were excellent, especially the 8:45 segment that led the Torres story — great use of dispatcher audio at the start, situation video from the bridge and interviews throughout to provide context and move the story along. Congratulations to all who contributed to this effort — including the donors who supported this work and the editors who managed it. Here’s hoping the matter is not set aside but that these talented journalists continue to chronicle the needs of people who have few champions. This is a model of journalism worthy of careful consideration in other communities.”
That model was a months-long collaboration between NMPolitics.net, the Las Cruces Sun-News and KRWG that sought to quantify problems with the region’s struggling behavioral health system, make the issue tangible through strong storytelling, and seek solutions. The project was made possible by a $5,000 grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
The result, the 2017 series “Distressed,” has won other awards. It joined joined a Netflix documentary, a New York Times bestselling book and The Players’ Tribune, among others, in receiving national awards from the organization Mental Health America in May. And in March, the series took home the New Mexico Press Women’s first-place award for investigative reporting.
The series has also twice won national awards in competitions among newspapers in the USA Today Network, which includes the Sun-News.
Reporters Carlos Andres López and Diana Alba Soular and photojournalist Robin Zielinski from the Sun-News collaborated with NMPolitics.net editor and publisher Heath Haussamen to produce the four-story, two-video package on behavioral health, which published in November 2017. KRWG’s Anthony Moreno also contributed reporting to the series.