American Apparel advertisement.

Maybe American Apparel would not have made such a great neighbor on Valencia. NBC reports that a former employee is suing the company and its CEO and founder Dov Charney for sexual harassment and forcing her to perform oral sex at Charney’s New York apartment.

When American Apparel tried to move into the Mission District in the spring of 2009, some business owners along Valencia Street raised questions about Charney’s reputation. Amanda Martinez reported that even then the founder had legal problems regarding his treatment of women.

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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