How Mission Local spun off from UC Berkeley and became a self-sustaining news outlet

Lydia Chavez originally used it as a teaching tool for her journalism students.

One of the great things about being a college journalism major today is that it’s incredibly easy for professors to build their own news sites and allow students to experience every aspect of the publishing process. Not that long ago, journalism students had few avenues for publication outside their college newspaper.

Lydia Chavez took advantage of this dynamic while teaching at UC Berkeley. In 2008, she and her colleagues launched Mission Local, a local news blog that covered San Francisco’s Mission District. It quickly gained traction within the community, and in 2014 Lydia spun it out into its own independent news organization. Today, it’s fully sustained by a mix of large and small donors.

In our interview, Lydia walked me through how she incorporated the site into her journalism curriculum, why she spun it out from the university, and whether she thinks Mission Local’s model can be replicated across the US.

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Transcript

Hey, Lydia, thanks for joining us.

Sure, thank you.

So you helped launch a local news site in San Francisco called Mission Local. For people who don't know San Francisco or that area, what is the Mission District?

The Mission District is the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco. It's actually where Mission Dolores was first established by the Spanish and it is incredibly vibrant. I chose this district because it's identifiable. And in the beginning we were really pretty much focused on the Mission, but I also felt that from the Mission District, you could report on any problem in San Francisco. It's very rich culturally and it has every urban ill. It's kind of the perfect place to report on all of San Francisco, but we've expanded our coverage since then.

And you have a deep background as a reporter going all the way back to like the 80s, right?

Yes, yes. I reported for, you know, Time Magazine. I started with the Albuquerque Tribune, which is very local, no longer exists. Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times. My last job was with the New York Times. And I worked on the business desk and also the Metro desk and also the foreign desk.

I covered the war in El Salvador and sort of the rise of democracy in Argentina after Alfonsín’s election.

Did you ever cover local news, like when you were in Albuquerque?

Oh, yeah. I mean, Albuquerque is all local. That's completely it. And actually, I got my start when I worked at Columbia, when I was a student at Columbia J school, I had never really had much journalism experience. So I worked for free for the West Sider. which was a throwaway newspaper. And I covered an issue there that ended up being my master's thesis that later got published in New York Magazine. So I did a lot of local reporting.

And what drew you to academia?

Well, a couple of things. First of all, I had a couple of children. And I really wanted to spend more time with them. And it seemed like a good sort of mix. But it was tough to give up reporting. I loved it. You know, I loved being a reporter and I loved working at the Times. It was a great job.

And you teach at Berkeley?

I taught in Berkeley up until 2019. 29 years. And Mission Local actually started as a project at Berkeley. 

And did you teach all kinds of journalism courses?

It was for entering level graduate students. I taught the basic reporting and writing class in which you're preparing students for summer internships. And then they would come back the next year and work on what they needed to work on.

And I also taught a lot of foreign reporting classes and sort of started at Berkeley the foreign reporting specialty where we would bring journalists from abroad. At first I taught the Latin American courses, but then if you haven't been to a country in a while or reported for a country for a while, you become a little bit outdated in what you know about the country. So we started this fellowship program where we would bring reporters from Latin America, from India, from China, to teach with another professor at Berkeley. And then students would take a trip to that country and do a series of articles. So I was very keen on doing that as well.

And so you started in the early 90s and then you went all the way up to 2019. It kind of strikes me that, obviously, most colleges, universities, they've historically had some kind of print newspaper or maybe a literary magazine or some kind of spinoff publication. But for the most part, if you wanted to practice journalism in college, you had to work for that generic newspaper. Whereas once you entered the 2000s, there was the rise of the blogosphere. And my general sense is this opened up a lot of opportunity for journalism departments because faculty could basically launch their own publications on any matter of niches and then, you know, give their students some real world experience on a specific niche, like actual niche based reporting and stuff like that. Is that generally true?

Absolutely. And it was a huge opportunity for Berkeley. And the dean at that time, Neil Henry, sort of saw this and also saw that it was a way also in which to raise money to allow us to sort of enter the real world where students had to learn how to work in different media. It wasn't just print. It was video, audio. And we could have classes that were media agnostic in the sense that you could teach a class where students would be working on all the different media. But the Mission Locals started as part of that project.

In the end, Berkeley ended up with three pretty strong locals. And they were fabulous teaching vehicles for students because they were kind of giving back to the community. The community was getting this great news coverage. And the students were getting real world experience where readers held them accountable.

So to kind of summarize what you're saying is that, as part of the teaching process, the Berkeley journalism department decided to launch actual local news sites. And as part of the curriculum for the students. It was graduate students?

It was graduate students.

As part of their curriculum, they actually had to go out into the community and just learn all these skills and do this beat reporting and then it was published to these websites.

Right. And before, they would do that as well, but we would try to get their articles published in the local media that were around, which was difficult. But the locals really gave them a home publication and a home readership that held them accountable. It started in 2008. It was really great.

And to start out with, was it completely funded by the university?

Yeah. I mean, my salary was paid by the university and the students were free. I mean, it was really a great exchange and a great learning experience. And then in 2014, a new dean came in who was not that keen on the locals and he wanted to cut them back to just when students were in session. And I felt like, you know, to me, that wasn't a real local and just for the service of the students, it was really no longer for service of the community. So he asked me if I wanted to take Mission Local separate. It was also the only local that was not in the East Bay where Berkeley is. So I, I mean, it was nutty, but I said, sure. So I did it. And yeah, we've been independent ever since.

Well, when you launched, were you just publishing to some kind of inexpensive blogging platform like WordPress or something?

We were set up on WordPress, yeah.

And what were the core areas of coverage that the students were focusing on?

As with any sort newspaper, there are news trends, housing or gentrification would be important one year, police would be important the next year. I mean, we always had a smattering and students had beats, but there always seemed to be a trend of news that we would follow.. But we always kind of focused on issues that are really important to all of San Francisco, but often negatively impact communities of color.

That has been sort of our calling card, and doing a lot of street reporting. The site still remains a training ground for young reporters. And our staff has, from the get-go, been diverse. And I sort of feel like it's a site where we're training a group of reporters that reflects San Francisco's diversity.

And what signals were you getting early on that it was having some kind of community impact?

Til this day, most of our support comes from readers. 74% of our budget is reader funded. And so I think that is the biggest thing. We've always been driven by, you know, content, like adding value to what's out there, not trying to repeat what the Chronicle and others are doing, but trying to add value, do it differently. I think it really came into sharp relief how important we were to the community and to the issues that we covered during COVID. I mean, we were on the ground. We were the only media, I think, that was still going into the office. And we had rules. You couldn't go inside anyone's house or any closed place to interview people. But you had to be out on the street reporting. And being out on the street, we picked up on a very big story, which was

everyone in the city knew that most of the people getting sick were Latinx, the Latinx population. But no one was looking at where the city was spending its testing resources. Like what population was that going to? And the city was not reporting that data. We were sort of picking up bits and pieces of data and putting it together on a rudimentary spreadsheet and discovered that the city was only spending 9% of its resources on the population that was getting 50% of the cases. So that was a big story in a series that actually ended up getting named a semi-finalist in Goldsmith. the following year, but it was a very important article. And I think people really saw then that it's so important to have a strong local media and a media that's paying attention to stories that others aren't paying attention to. 

I was flummoxed. I kept thinking after we broke the first story that we're going to be totally overtaken by the other media that has a much more sophisticated data team. And we never were. I mean, it was kind of alarming to me. So there are a lot of stories out there that aren't being told that need to be told. And we try and fill that void.

You mentioned in 2014, you got a new dean that wasn't really keen on continuing this project. You decided to spin it off. What did you have to do to spin it off? Like, did you have to go out and find some kind of foundation support or something like that?

You know, I've always been terrible on the business side. I mean, we had very low expenses. I had a little bit of savings, and so I used that. And with that, we sort of managed. We grew very slow. I mean, up until in 2020 when COVID hit, we were still only four people. And I'm free. I have a pension, so I didn't need to get paid. So it was a very lean ship for quite a while. And then slowly it became bigger with the help of foundation, but also with the help of our reader support.

In that period between 2014 and 2020, what were the main funding mechanisms for it? Because, I mean, obviously the pension allowed you to work for free, but if you got up to three or four people, then that's a decent amount of overhead.

Yeah, but it was very low overhead. We weren't paying people a lot. We were giving them the opportunity to build a portfolio. We were paying people. But I don't think we started giving health insurance until 2017, 2016. Yeah. because we couldn't afford to.

So when you were able to afford to, where was that revenue coming in? Was that small donors?

It was coming from a mix of small and larger donors, yeah.

When did you launch your donation program, especially for the small donors?

In the very beginning, but it was also sort of in a way passive income because I was so fixed on just producing good content. I always felt like if you produce good content, the readers will come. And we also, at the beginning, we had this arrangement with the Chronicle where they had a section where they ran like the first three or four graphs of  any kind of local media that was out there, and then we would get a link back. So our traffic went way up with that. And that was good. And also the exposure was very good in terms of readership. And then in 2017, we hired Joe Eskenazi, who is by far the best political reporter in San Francisco. And he's been tremendously loyal and amazing.

And he also just really helped broaden our readership and our donor support. So, you know, it really builds, which is a big plus from reader content. I think what we're finding now is we could use a transformative amount of funding. That would be nice.

In terms of driving donations, do you rely completely just on a generic donation button or you do funding drives?

No, we just did a funding drive. We had matching funds of $25,000 and in less than three weeks, I think we met our goal of $50,000. That was the first time we did a Spring drive. We had a very good chair of Mission Local, Frances Dinkelspiel, and she recommended doing that. So we did it. And then we did a series of newsletters along with that. We do a big funding drive, of course, at the end of the year. And every year we've increased our take from that funding drive.

So you said that up until 2020, you had only four people. And then the pandemic happens, obviously, that drove a lot of traffic to your site. How did that change things for you in terms of your funding sources and how you were able to expand and stuff like that?

Chan Zuckerberg gave us a grant of $100,000. I mean, it just came over the transom. We would like to give you some money. And they did that for two years. And that was transformative for us because I saw how important it was to have a really strong data team. And we took that money and hired an excellent data person. And now we have two other people working on data. So we have three people, we do phenomenal projects. And that was really important. So our coverage of COVID drove that donation, and we used that entirely to improve a segment that we were lacking in and that has made us so much better.

Did it also drive more small small donor donations?

Yeah absolutely

So how big is your team now?

Now we have nine reporters, including two senior editors. Joe Eskenazi is the managing editor. We hired another senior editor, Joe Rivano, because we simply have too many people to edit. And then we have two reporters who are paid for by the California Fellowship that's run out of Berkeley. And they're very strong on data and actually reporting as well. They're really great. great young reporters. And then we have a Report for America reporter as well. So there's only three reporters that we're actually paying for fully.

So now that you have a larger staff, what are the core beats that you're covering? I talked to a lot of local media entrepreneurs and some, especially the non-profit oriented, it's almost 100% civic based, like covering local... you know, city council meetings, board of supervisors, schools and stuff like that, versus another kind of local news site, often for-profit, that covers all that, but it also heavily covers business, new opening businesses, crime, different stuff like that. What have you found to be a good mix of beat coverage for your site?

Well, you know, since we're always training, the reporters will get dailies, of course. But also our reputation is digging deeper, following up. I think everything is in the follow-up. You know, that's where you find the good stories. So for instance, there was a fire out in Potrero Hill, a housing project. This was in February 23. But this story is still with us and we're still following up. So I send a reporter out there. I kind of figured other media are going to go there, but not really. It's, you know, out of the way. It's a project. A man died in this fire. No one went out there except Mission Local and a smart reporter who started asking questions about  how this fire happened. And it was quickly apparent to the reporter that there was this mix of tenants, paying tenants and squatters living there and sort of getting into squabbles. And the management company that was paid for by the housing authority was doing nothing. They didn't even arrive on the day of the fire. So she did a follow-up, she did another follow-up. And in the meantime, we filed for a lot of public documents and we discovered this document on the second tranche of documents that the city had known all along that this management company wasn't doing its job. So that triggered hearings. So hearings are held, things get a little better. But we don't drop the story.

And this is what I train our reporters to do. We sent another reporter out there to see what was happening. She discovers that, you know, someone from the management company who had since been fired was charging the squatters rent. I mean, totally ridiculous. Illegal. And, you know, again, people were complaining about the maintenance of the place. So we wrote that story just last month. I think again, hearings have been held. We'll see, we'll keep going back. And I think that is our calling card.

Right now we're doing a tremendous amount on elections. I mean, this is the first year that San Francisco is gonna have a mayoral election in a presidential year, which means that there's gonna be a lot more voters for all of the local elections. And people are famously uninformed about local elections. So we started more than a month ago, a series for each supervisor's race. There are six supervisors up to be replaced, and so we have a weekly series asking them questions and sending reporters out to the just different districts once a week to meet with voters. All of this is so that the reporters can learn more about the city and the different districts also and source up, and we're translating it into spanish and chinese.

And this is another thing. We have three people who speak Cantonese. There are five people on the staff who speak Spanish. So we have the cultural entree and linguistic entree into a lot of communities that other media don't have. We're translating all of this into Spanish and Chinese and we're sharing it with whoever wants it. We're trying to see if we can increase engagement in places where there's lower engagement, if we can just make for a more informed voter. And we're doing a lot on campaign finance. I mean, the data team has done unbelievable work on campaign finance.And all of this is available to everyone and translated into two different languages. So that's our focus this year. At the same time, we're still trying to do, you know, work on housing and police reform and the other beats that we've consistently covered.

So historically, local newspapers have been a good entry point for journalists into their careers. That's how I got my start in journalism. Are you finding yourself hiring a lot of entry level reporters and having to train them on the basics of journalism and beat reporting and local news and stuff like that?

Yes, absolutely. And we're hiring a lot of journalists of color. I would like to be part of that group that increases the pipeline of journalists. So after three or four years, we'll lose a journalist. They'll go elsewhere and that's fine. But in the meantime, maybe the first year or the first six months is a lot of training and working with them and developing them. But they get really good very fast. We're very much in demand as a place to be. in terms of the young aspiring journalists, because we give them a lot of agency. So we get a lot out of the people who are working for us, and they get a lot from us.

Someone's visiting now. He's staying with me at the house, a former reporter who was actually working through the pandemic with me, and he's now at the Washington Post. I mean, that's what we like to see. 

So do you produce any non-written content like podcasts or video or anything like that?

You know, we have in the past. Now we're going to have a couple of interns this summer who are strong in video and we hope to do more. I think a podcast is probably not for us immediately because we just don't have the staff to do it. If we had the money, maybe. No one has really figured out in San Francisco how to create the really strong local podcast.

Yeah, I've written in my newsletter about why there aren't many good examples of local news podcasts. And a lot of it has to do with just like – local businesses are just not sophisticated ad buyers and even though they might be doing radio advertising, they don't understand the value of podcasts.

I've had Lance Noble on from Cityside.  They started out with Berkeleyside and now they've kind of expanded beyond that. Obviously there are other districts in San Francisco and the Bay area as a whole. Do you have any ambitions to expand beyond Mission Local?

Well, you know, our coverage is now citywide. It's been citywide for a while. Our donor base is citywide. AndI think what distinguishes our coverage is doing stories that others don't do. So, you know, finding those really great pieces that are out there that no one else is looking at.

And the fact that our reporters are out on the street reporting, you pick things up when you're out. You're not just going to meetings. You're just talking to people. And there's a lot of interaction between our reporters and residents across San Francisco. So that's a big plus for us.

We're also focusing a lot this year on building out our business side. This is something we've never focused on. We've been very passive about it because of time and I just didn't have the bandwidth. But Google just gave us some money to hire a business development person, so we've hired that person. She's amazing. And we'd like just to build up that side so that our revenue sources are maybe 30-30-30 divided. 

So there's small donors, but I also interview a lot of local news nonprofits where they have a large emphasis on courting large donors, but then also grant writing and foundation support. With  that business person, how much are they going to be focused on that part?

They are focused on larger donors and they're looking at trying to increase that of course, and we ourselves do a lot of the grant writing. Those are longer plays. We will apply for the first Press Forward open call. And we're constantly trying to meet people and looking for new sources. We'd love to get the American Journalism Project to give us a huge grant. It all takes time. You know, there are a lot of people like us. There are a lot of people out there that are doing very good work. So the competition is pretty stiff.

Speaking of which, so obviously the local print legacy newspaper industry has been hit by hard times. A number of factors there, not having to do with the economics of local news, but, you know, private equity funds and different stuff like that also playing a part. Mission Local is often cited as one of the bright use cases, you know, people point to as, okay, this might be a viable future for local news, but obviously you're in a very affluent, high profile city. How replicable do you think your model could be across the rest of the United States?

Yeah, I think it can be replicated. I think we could be very much a model. And I think the thing that's different, very different about us compared to other nonprofits is our training programs. And I think that has been tremendous in terms of the talent that we're able to attract because of it. Our salaries can start out a little bit lower. They're pretty nice salaries, though. We're starting people pretty well. But they're only here for three to four years, so they're not going to be earning $100,000 by the time they leave.