Alum part of Santa Cruz team that won Pulitzer Prize for breaking news
Photojournalist’s images and video part of award-winning coverage of destructive Santa Cruz storms
On May 6, Kevin Painchaud (B.A., ’97) received a cryptic message from his boss, the managing editor of Lookout Santa Cruz, a digital-only news organization covering Santa Cruz County. She told him and the rest of the 10-person newsroom to assemble for a company meeting at 10 a.m. “Don’t worry — it’s good news,” she told him. No one had any clue what she was about to say.
The editorial team assembled via Zoom. That’s when Managing Editor Tamsin McMahon blurted out, “We won the Pulitzer!” There was stunned silence. She repeated herself, but this time with context: “We won the Pulitzer for our breaking news coverage of the Santa Cruz storms.” McMahon had submitted an application for the coveted journalism prize in secret, thus the dumbfounded reactions of her staff.
Kevin Painchaud
After watching the televised broadcast of the Pulitzer Prize announcement, it finally sunk in. Painchaud, the Lookout’s only photographer and videographer, was in tears. “For me, the years of insecurity and second-guessing my passion for photojournalism as a career suddenly brought validity to what I love to do more than anything else, which is to tell stories with my photos,” he said in a recorded speech posted to the Lookout Santa Cruz YouTube page.
The storms that battered Santa Cruz County began Jan. 1, with the most destructive on Jan. 4, and continued for three months.
“It was huge amounts of rain… high tide, and the biggest swell in a long time. And then the saturated soil from previous rains created a perfect storm that literally just flooded so many areas,” Painchaud said. “There’s a lot of restaurants on the coast — they got destroyed. Two of our piers got destroyed.”
A School of Cinema graduate, Painchaud drove from one flooding site to the next, capturing it all with his camera and posting it to the website and social media in real time.
“There were communities that were flooding and they didn’t know where to find out where to evacuate, where to go to get certain supplies, where to get sandbags,” he said. “We were kind of it for the county. Everybody turned to us. It was just the drive that our entire team had, to be there for our entire county and community.”
Painchaud continues to be recognized for his coverage during that period. First it was the Pulitzer, and then on July 15 the California Newspaper Publishers Association awarded him the Photo of the Year award for an image he captured of a man assessing damage done to his dream beach home in Rio Del Mar.
Painchaud started his photojournalism career in high school when he began working for the school newspaper. That’s when he fell for the profession. “It allowed me to learn about people — who they really are and not who they are perceived to be,” Painchaud said. “Having that access and that kind of connection with humans, I just loved it.
By college, he was an experienced photojournalist who had covered politics, sports and entertainment. But he was onto something new — film and television. While he was earning his undergraduate degree at San Francisco State, he was filming a television show called “Music on the Edge” that aired on different cable channels. He’d follow around touring bands. “The city was my little backyard TV show,” he said. “I knew all the venues; any concert I wanted to go to for free and shoot.”
Painchaud wasn’t that involved in campus life because he was so busy with the TV show and other projects. He owned a clothing line and co-founded SF State’s improv group, Small Chicken, with his friend Cole Stratton (a 2022 Alumni Hall of Fame inductee). They performed on an off campus.
What defined his college experience was the community he created. “I love that intimate feel of the college and the community that we had there,” he said. “It’s fun having such a small campus and a good network of friends.”
He moved to Los Angeles and pursued a career in television and film after earning his degree. He worked in the film industry for more than a decade before deciding to move home to Santa Cruz to raise a family near his parents. That’s when he reignited an old flame — photojournalism.
“I’m doing the job that I wanted to do since I was a sophomore in high school and I want to do this for rest of my life,” he said. “I have so much creative freedom and the ability to tell the story the right way, through photos.”
Eric Stark looks out of an opening in his home in Rio Del Mar after it was ravaged by 2023 winter storms. Credit: Kevin Painchaud/Lookout Santa Cruz
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