From Palisades to Ash

When I spoke to Jacob Soboroff on Thursday afternoon, he was standing on a street corner in the Pacific Palisades, where he grew up. The sky was blue, he said, clashing with the charred scenes of apocalyptic ruin on the ground. Homes and businesses had been entirely burnt to ash. I asked him what it smelled like. Soboroff said he would describe the scent lingering in the California air with a single word: "Noxious."

"You're not just breathing in the smoke," the NBC News correspondent explained by phone, harnessing weak cellular service in the devastated region to speak to me. "It's everything that has burned. I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

Soboroff always approaches stories in a personal way. Anyone who has watched his work over the years knows that he reports from the heart, whether covering child separation at the border or the war in Ukraine. But this story is more personal than usual.

Soboroff grew up in the Palisades. It's where he and his siblings were raised. They attended school in the area, dined in the neighborhood’s restaurants, and frequented its shops. The ties run deep. Years ago, when he was a child, his parents even raised money to install playground equipment at the local park. It is all a long way of saying that, of the parade of national news correspondents and anchors now on the ground, Soboroff is among the few who knows the area intimately. It's not just another neighborhood to him. It's home.

"I can close my eyes and drive the streets," Soboroff said. "I know the curves of the streets. I know what shops are on what corner. I can visualize it all."

Soboroff will have to lean on those existing memories of the neighborhood because it is now entirely gone, or "ripped off the map," as he put it. The homes, schools, and businesses have been reduced to piles of ash after a raging wildfire roared through the area earlier this week and swallowed up everything in its path. The only thing left in its wake have been the ruinous scenes playing as b-roll on national newscasts. It looks like a war zone, or as if a bomb went off and flattened the area for miles.

When it was safe to do so this week, Soboroff traveled to his childhood home for a moving piece that aired Wednesday on the "NBC Nightly News." Despite the severity of the damage in the area, he told me that he genuinely didn't know what he was going to find. When he arrived, he learned that — like the vast majority of the other houses — the place he had grown up in had been claimed by the fire. He FaceTimed his mother as he surveyed the damage. "I really don't know what to say," Soboroff remarked in the piece, staring at what was once his home.

Soboroff is a national correspondent, meaning he is often the one parachuting into different cities to cover a big story, and then decamping a few days later when the news cycle has moved on. It's not a mark against national news reporters, it's simply the nature of the job. But I wondered what it is like for Soboroff, a native to the area, to see that phenomenon occur in his own hometown.

"It's surreal to see a network crew, from my own network, here doing a live broadcast when I am actually standing outside a Chinese restaurant that I frequented countless nights with my mom and dad," Soboroff told me, adding that it's simply "crazy" to see "all the big anchors and correspondents and bold faces of news" reporting from his childhood streets.

I asked if it would change the way he approaches assignments in the future. Without hesitation, Soboroff answered in the affirmative. "I don't think I'll ever think about doing it in the same way now that I've experienced it here," he candidly replied.

"I think that everywhere I have been, I try to treat people with the same respect and empathy that I would like," Soboroff said. "But it's hard not to think about what it must feel like now that I've watched people who are not from here walk around my own neighborhood. That part has been a reflective moment for me as a journalist."