El Paso, one year later

The Dallas Morning News
07/31/2020

We’re proud to nominate Alfredo Corchado, Cassandra Jaramillo and James Barragan for the Showcase Award for Enterprise & Innovation in Journalism. They came together as a team for spot news coverage and many enterprise stories about the terrible, racist-driven massacre of almost two dozen people at an El Paso Walmart in the fall of 2019. But the work didn’t stop there.

James was insistent about not letting this tragedy fade from our readers’ memories. Cassandra developed and embraced deep connections with sources who trusted her with their most horrifying and intimate thoughts and memories about that day. Alfredo was the heart of this team, and in his generous way he led them on what developed into a yearlong project to reconstruct a complete story of that horrible day and to share the personal stories of three families who lost loved ones.

This ambitious narrative detailing how a gunman from Allen set out to kill as many Hispanics as possible on a sunny Saturday morning was reported and written while the three reporters also performed their daily journalism duties. They worked together flawlessly to deliver on their vision. As one of the reporters said during the late stages of editing, the radicalization and actions of the gunman needed to be shared with our readers, for any of reporters could have been a victim, simply because of their skin. The result is a strong, compelling story of tolerance and forgiveness.

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Submitted by Chelsea Watkins.