The San Francisco Chronicle reported that cases of domestic violence rose sharply in San Francisco from mid-2010 to mid-2011, according to a draft report prepared by the city. The report also showed a spike in phone calls to domestic violence crisis lines in the first quarter of 2012, which coincided with Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s arrest on charges of domestic violence. The Chronicle asserted that such an uptick in calls, coincidental or not, disproves the claim that media attention to the sheriff’s case would scare abused women into silence. Read more here.
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/executive 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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