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<\/p>\nWhile digging through the LexisNexis CourtLink database \u2014 a repository that houses court cases and documents \u2014 investigative and data reporter Susie Neilson stumbled across the kind of information that gives a journalist pause.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also the kind of information that would lead to an investigation so comprehensive and consequential that it would earn the San Francisco Chronicle the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.<\/p>\n
A month or so earlier, she\u2019d read an investigative story about Hurricane Helene survivors who had been underpaid by their insurance companies and left struggling to rebuild their lives. She thought that kind of thing might be happening to Californians, too, given the state\u2019s track record with devastating wildfires. She walked over to the desk of insurance reporter Megan Fan Munce to ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had within a day contacted some sources and unearthed this obscure database of investigations into California-based insurance companies,\u201d Neilson said.<\/p>\n
The two reporters sat on newsroom couches for a full workday, digging into the investigations, and found that the major insurers were all using the same algorithm, 360Value, to set coverage limits for policyholders.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe realized that there might be a much bigger problem, which is that the widespread use of 360Value was causing this epidemic of underinsurance in California, where after every major wildfire, we had seen these photos and heard these stories of communities struggling to recover and rebuild for years and years,\u201d Neilson said.<\/p>\n
That revelation led Neilson to CourtLink. The court case she\u2019d excavated was between Farmers Insurance Company, one of the state\u2019s largest insurance providers, and a California homeowner. Neilson knew she was on to something, so she reached out to the lawyers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked whether they would be down to chat with me and they refused to talk, but they gave us a huge folder of documents,\u201d Neilson said. \u201cAnd then when we followed up, we learned that it is extremely unusual to get access to this kind of documentation from behind the scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The internal company emails, studies and homeowner complaints revealed that Farmers was relying on 360Value even though the company was fully aware the algorithm was faulty.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t the first lawsuit that she\u2019d come across, but it would prove to be a defining moment in the reporting. The files took Neilson, Munce, and eventually, politics reporter Sara DiNatale on a yearlong journey up into the Santa Cruz Mountains and down to the Sierra Nevada foothills community of Grizzly Flats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Roger Cohn looks for items amid the ruins of his girlfriend Lisa Anderson\u2019s home, destroyed by the Palisades Fire, in January 2025. (Stephen Lam\/S.F. Chronicle)<\/p>\n
Neilson and Munce, along with a team of visual journalists, spent months with families and community members who had lost everything in California\u2019s sweeping wildfires. Even though some of the fires had been years ago, many lots stood empty. In some cases, families were living in trailers on their properties, never able to rebuild because insurance paid a fraction of what their homes were worth. It all made Munce emotional.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow devastating it was as a Californian who didn\u2019t really grasp that scale of permanent devastation before being physically in those places and talking to those people,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd (we were) saying to ourselves, wow, the next time this happens, it\u2019s going to be really devastating again.\u201d<\/p>\n
They knew they had to get the story out, Munce said, so that consumers would have what they needed to make informed decisions about their insurance policies before the next fire ravaged another California community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The two reporters broke for the holidays, and when they came back in January 2025, the inevitable happened. On an early morning breaking news shift, Munce learned from an editor that a large wildfire had broken out in the Palisades and Eaton communities of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
It was time to tell the story, and Neilson and Munce knew they had what they needed to show how underinsurance was blighting California homeowners in a way that the insurance companies couldn\u2019t easily dispute.<\/p>\n
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Bront\u00eb Wittpenn \/ San Francisco Chronicle staff photographer<\/p>\n
But as the months wore on, they found there was more reporting and more stories to tell \u2014 an overwhelming amount.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew we wouldn\u2019t be able to tell them by the end of the year,\u201d Neilson said, so they \u201ccried out for help\u201d to their managing editor. It was at that time that DiNatale joined the investigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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