To contribute, send in a headline and a snap to info@missionlocal.com. I'm a copy editor and a Bay Area native who's lived in San Francisco since 2004. I've written for local publications like the SF Weekly, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco magazine, as well as the New Yorker, the Guardian, Wired, Mother Jones and others. My favorite tacos and alambres come from El Farolito.
The biggest tech story dominating Washington right now is, incidentally, a media story. Last week, shortly after The Washington Post laid off 400 staffers and closed many of its desks, and before its absentee CEO Will Lewis got summarily shoved out, I wrote a column trying to figure out whether there was even a cynical, self-interested reason that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos continued to own the Post: Was it to support journalism, make money, or suck up to Donald Trump?
The latest: The Washington Post is laying off hundreds of journalists in an effort to "restructure" the newsroom and cut costs. In 2024, the company began prioritizing subscriptions over digital advertising, raising the yearly fee to access content. The big picture: While major media companies and news organizations tinker with delivery methods, tiered subscriptions and bundles that include non-news packages, including crossword puzzles and games, local news is still operating standard paywalls, relying on subscription-based revenue instead of digital advertising.
We've had political assassinations. We had a multi-fatality school shooting, and now the largest immigration crackdown in American history has all happened in Minneapolis in the last eight months,
The Minnesota Star Tribune is the state's biggest newspaper, and has been doing an excellent job of covering every angle of "Operation Metro Surge" - the federal government's mass deportation effort that started in December. But it is also competing in a real-time news environment where everyone is a reporter, and cellphone videos and social media posts are widely distributed.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will shut down on May 3 after nearly 240 years of operation, the company announced Wednesday. This is tragic for those who live in the communities of Pittsburgh and who should be able to have numerous independent, useful sources of local information, news and opinions. It's a tragedy for the journalists who, amid an almost unthinkable labor feud, have been thwarted from providing service to the people of Pittsburgh.
I've been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley's J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
He's headed to villages where, owing to increasing exposure to Russian fire, only a fraction of residents remain. The war has cut them off from regular services. They no longer receive mail, and Russian transmitters often overpower or interfere with their Ukrainian mobile-phone signals. Before large-scale signal jamming was introduced to counter drones, Russian television and radio channels were accessible on televisions and radios in border-area communities.
Founder/Executive Editor. I've been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley's J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
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I've spent a fair amount of 2025 toggling between my parents' MyChart accounts. From scheduling appointments to reviewing test results, I - and their doctors - have a one-stop shop for managing their various healthcare needs. A hematologist can request lab work, and a gastroenterologist can review the data before recommending a medication or procedure. Everyone is working from the same information. It's time-stamped, efficient, and verifiable.
Forty years of toxic media policy, the libertarian ethos of big tech, the collapse of the 20th-century business model, the paranoia and extremism of online life, the rise of the far right: when stirred together, these nutrients do not constitute the soil for a healthy free press. This is certainly not the first time people have found themselves with a dearth of formal news structures. Besides most of human history, one could point to present-day Hungary or Turkey or Saudi Arabia.
'They're like an invasive species,' one source said. 'They overpower all the resources and make the businesses in those neighborhoods vulnerable. That's where dollar stores can thrive. No matter what community, the cause of food deserts stem from one route, and that's economic disinvestment in vulnerable communities.' Wright's work, which , shows the approach of the nonprofit, Black-led national newsroom with local newsrooms in Atlanta and Gary, Indiana.
All that work was published online, too. But with several changes in the content management system in the 26 years since I started at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, only four of those stories still live on that newsroom's site. I've reported on journalists have to do to save their own digital archives for years. And I've always thought of it more as an individual issue.
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don't mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that's provisional, and purely functional, if barely-your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your strip malls. These are dumps, but our dumps. Among my own cherished dumps are old newsrooms. My first was the Trentonian, a New Jersey tabloid that's still limping along, though its former headquarters, where I worked, now houses a gypsum-supply company.
