American Dispatch

Lydia Chavez is the founder and executive editor of Mission Local, a hyperlocal and bilingual news site that covers the Mission District in San Francisco. Lydia was born and raised in Albuquerque and her first reporting job after graduating from Columbia’s Journalism School was with The Albuquerque Tribune (now closed). She then went on to work at TIME Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. In 1990, Lydia started working at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which was where Mission Local originally was founded as a project in 2008.

In 2014, Mission Local became independent. The outlet publishes articles about city corruption, police misconduct, and, more recently, how the coronavirus is affecting the Mission District majority Latino population.

To donate to Mission Local, click here.

To read some of their most recent (and very excellent) investigative work, check out their most recent stories, “Special Report: Structural engineers’ warnings over city’s mandatory retrofits have gone unheeded for years,” and “Special Report: ‘It could become a San Bruno’ — the explosive problem buried beneath San Francisco homes,” both published by Joe Eskenazi.

Lydia’s shoutout was to some great Bay Area outlets that haven’t been mentioned yet on the podcast, Cityside, a local journalism nonprofit that oversees two great hyperlocal outlets, Oaklandside and Berkeleyside. Lydia also gave a shoutout to Open Vallejo, a nonprofit newsroom that covers police misconduct.

Thomas Peele is a Bay Area-based investigative reporter who has been working in the industry since 1983. For 20 years, he worked at the Bay Area News Group, where he was part of the team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting about the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. Thomas is the author of Killing the Messenger, a book about the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. Thomas was also the lead reporter for the Chauncey Bailey Project, where a collaborative group of reporters investigated who was behind the murder of Chauncey.

Thomas is currently an investigative reporter for EdSource, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education in California. He is also a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. To read Thomas’s work, click here. And to follow him on Twitter, click here.

Thomas’s shoutout is to David DeBolt, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times who shared the 2017 Pulitzer Prize with Thomas. To read David’s work, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here.

Note: When I interviewed Thomas Peele for this episode, Tribune Publishing, a newspaper chain that owns the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, had reached a deal to be purchased by Alden Global Capital. It’s a New York-based hedge fund that is notorious for destroying local newspapers by buying them up, selling off their assets and cutting reporting jobs. Then, in mid-March, it was reported that a Maryland hotel executive and Swiss billionaire were also interested in the purchase, potentially saving the newspaper chain from Alden. On April 4, the hotel executive and billionaire made a better offer than Alden to buy Tribune Publishing. The final buyer has yet to be announced. To learn more, click here.

Hana Baba is a longtime, award-winning radio journalist in the Bay Area. She is currently the host of “Crosscurrents,” a daily radio show on KALW Radio. In addition to her role at KALW, Hana is the co-host of another show, a podcast called The Stoop, where she and Leila Day discuss stories from across the Black diaspora.

I met Hana back in 2017 when I interned with KALW during the summer. Hana later met with our student newspaper when I was editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Foghorn. I was struck by how she approached community journalism, representation in newsrooms, and how the coverage of a community can affect the larger narrative about that group. In this episode, we discuss those themes, as well as the vexing problem of diversifying journalism talent while local/regional news outlets suffer financially.

To listen to KALW, click here. To donate, click here. To subscribe to The Stoop, click here.

Hana’s shoutout was El Tecolote, a fantastic bilingual, biweekly newspaper that covers San Francisco’s Mission District. To read El Tecolote, click here. To donate, click here.

To learn more about the American Dispatch Podcast, go to amdipodcast.substack.com.

Tim Redmond is a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco who has been in the muckraking business for close to 40 years. He’s currently editor of 48Hills, an online, progressive, non-profit news outlet based out of San Francisco that offers breaking news, investigative reporting and arts and culture pieces. In addition to his duties at 48Hills, Tim teaches undergraduate journalism at the University of San Francisco as well as a class for the School of Arts in Urban and Public Affairs program.

In this episode, we speak about how Tim got into journalism, the basics of the local news crisis, who is to blame for the crisis, why it is important that local news outlets exist in the first place and why Tim does this kind of work. The idea was for this episode to serve as an introduction so that listeners of this podcast could start wrapping their heads around the issue at hand.

Click here to support Tim and his work at 48Hills. 

Here are Tim's shoutouts:

El Tecolote - a bilingual newspaper covering San Francisco's Mission District

Mission Local - an online news outlet covering the Mission (and the rest of the city)

Berkeleyside - an online news outlet covering Berkeley

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez - a reporter and producer at KQED 

To learn more about the American Dispatch Podcast, go to amdipodcast.substack.com.

As a young boy 20 years ago, I landed on page two of the Sharon Advocate, the local newspaper in my hometown of 18,000 people in Sharon, Massachusetts. Sadly, that newspaper is now a shell of what it once was. Its story is like many other local/regional news outlets in the United States. Since 2004, close to 2,000 newspapers in the United States have shuttered. Local radio stations and television stations are also suffering. Thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. We are now facing "news deserts" in this country, where entire counties don't have a newspaper.

The American Dispatch Podcast is a chance to discuss the crisis of local and regional journalism. I'll be interviewing local journalists and media figures from across the country to dive deep into understanding the roots of the problem and what can be done about it. 

This podcast is also a chance to highlight the important work that local reporters are doing and drive either subscriptions/donations to their website/newspaper/podcast/etc. Going forward, you can expect to find links to the work of the individuals I interview.

For more information about the podcast, visit amdi.substack.com.

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Thank you to David Renda and Kevin MacLeod for the royalty-free music.