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Daniel Connolly, for the Pulitzer Center
Image by Alan Spearman
Memphis, Tenn.
Note: I wrote these blog entries in December, as I traveled to Mexico to report on the Craig Petties story. Now that we are ready to publish our articles on the case, we will be posting them over the next few days.
Sunday, Dec. 6. - I'm writing from Memphis now, making final preparations to go to Mexico to report on drug trafficking links to the South.
It's taken a lot of work to get to this point, and many people helped me. I hope to thank them all at a later date. For now, I'll just mention the key organizations that I've relied on. Many people from group Investigative Reporters and Editors have provided useful advice and contacts. I had planned on making this trip alone. But the grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting means that photographer and videographer Alan Spearman can accompany me. He is a very accomplished journalist and documentary filmmaker and has traveled more widely than I have. Notably, he circled the globe for The Commercial Appeal's "Memphis and the World" series in 2007. He has offered many useful tips as we prepare for this trip.
The end product will be much better because Alan is coming. I'm looking forward to meeting the Mexican journalists we'll be working with. This is truly going to be an international project from start to finish, and we're lucky to have the expertise of the local reporters on the ground. I hope to post more about this aspect of the trip later on. American and British journalists working in Mexico City have also been giving us tips, and it's a great feeling to have such support. We'll be in Mexico a relatively short time, after which we'll return to Memphis and do more reporting here. We expect the final project to be published later this year in The Commercial Appeal. I feel privileged to have a chance to do this work.