A cartoon with four panels
Cartoon by Neil Ballard

Thanks to Bill Hsu for the heads-up about a link that failed to work. It has been fixed here and below.

Imagine a newsroom packed with journalists who know as much as Joe Eskenazi about the city and write with the same speed, ebullience and humor. 

It’s not cloning, but in a sense, creating smart young journalists that happens every day at Mission Local. That’s because the staff learns the craft and the city by listening to Joe work the phones and riff about some political chicanery he’s uncovered until, well, it is overtaken by something even worse.  

Joe is one of a kind, but fortunately, he’s happy to pass along his knowledge and skills to each succeeding group of young reporters. You can see it here in the staff’s favorites from 2022.

Lucky for Mission Local! And lucky for you, too. We all benefit from that level of dedication. You can nurture it by making a contribution here. 

Thank you, 

Lydia

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. 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 there.

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.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.