So what would you do if you lost your job? Would you be able to get a temp job? Would you pass the typing test?

And if you failed, and managed to get a job in services, would you have enough money left out of your paycheck for health insurance and a place to live? How far from your work would you have to live?

I haven’t played this all the way through — I failed the typing test and have to live 40 miles out of town — but so far SPENT is an interesting online game developed by ad agency McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham to educate people about poverty, homelessness and UMD.

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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.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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