Jessica Lum

It doesn’t take much to keep a community news site alive – especially one supported by UC Berkeley. The school gives the Mission, two professors and really smart students for 30 weeks a year. City College and SF State kick in with a few really smart students of their own. In exchange, those students and community volunteers get a lot of training.

The rent, paying reporters during the other 22 weeks of the year and hiring fellows to keep up the coverage and consistency – all of that comes from you – our readers. Well, to be honest, for the last year it’s come from some private donors, readers and friends and family that we’ve appealed to, but community sites won’t survive for very long without reader support.

Connect community, encourage civic engagement and join our team by supporting the site. If 40 percent of our monthly readers contributed $25 a year each we would be fully and wonderfully supported. If you haven’t already, click here Now to join the team.

Thank you!

Follow Us

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.

Leave a comment

Please keep your comments short and civil. Do not leave multiple comments under multiple names on one article. We will zap comments that fail to adhere to these short and easy-to-follow rules.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *