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.
More by Lydia Chávez
It would have been great to have a written intro to who the people are doing the makeovers and essentially the point of the piece. The videos are great and I know from being a Mission Local myself that these are all Mission District shop owners – but I’m guessing they’d all like links and info about their shops somewhere in this article as well! Nice job on the video editing tho-!!!
Jenny: Really good point. We will add those in the next 24-hours–looking around now for someone to do it. Best, Lydia