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.