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.

In 2008, as the traditional local news industry was beginning its long decline, a new kind of journalism experiment quietly launched inside a classroom at UC Berkeley. It wasn’t backed by venture capital, nor was it chasing scale. Instead, it had a far more modest goal: give graduate journalism students a place to publish real reporting for a real audience.

That experiment would eventually evolve into Mission Local, one of the most cited examples of a sustainable nonprofit local news outlet in the United States.

Seventeen years later, the publication is no longer a classroom project. It’s an independent newsroom with nine reporters, a growing donor base, and a reputation for accountability journalism that punches above its weight. Its reporting has sparked government hearings, uncovered public health inequities, and trained a pipeline of journalists who now populate major national outlets.

But its success didn’t come from a master plan. It emerged from a series of pragmatic decisions—many of them driven by constraints—that collectively offer a blueprint for how local news can survive and even thrive.

In our interview, co-founder Lydia Chavez 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.

Let’s jump into it…

From Classroom Experiment to Community Newsroom

Mission Local’s origins are deeply tied to Lydia Chavez’s career arc.

Before entering academia, Chavez built a distinguished reporting career, working at outlets like Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. She covered everything from local issues in Albuquerque to international stories like the war in El Salvador and Argentina’s transition to democracy.

But after decades in the field, she made a shift.