Ruben Castaneda (born 1961) is a former reporter for the Washington Post and author of the memoir S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.[1][2][3][4] Castaneda was born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a gas company worker and a homemaker.
[6] After working at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner he was hired by the Washington Post in 1989 where he became a crime beat reporter in Washington, D. C. There he covered the height of DC's crack epidemic which saw over 400 murders a year, among the highest murder rate in the country.
[6] Castaneda left the Post in 2011 and worked on his memoir S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (2014).
In the memoir Castaneda explains that while he was working as a journalist for the Post he was also secretly buying and using crack himself, often from the same neighborhoods and people he was reporting on during the day.
[6] He was one of two first-place winners for "Feature Writing" in the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild's Front Page Awards (2007), for "Cracked" published in the Post.