a gil dressed in a pink dress with cartoon characters on either side
By Neil Ballard

Dear Readers:

Dios mío! It’s not easy being 15 – or celebrating for 15 days. But, already many of you have joined the party to support the work that we do. Thank you!

On Day 3 of our campaign, we give you three excellent reasons to do so.

  1. We are the first to arrive on the scene and the last to leave – even if it means staying until 4:30 a.m.
  2. Yes, we use data, but we also explore the data, and report it out into readable narratives, as in this four-part series on the city’s settlement cases with the SFPD.
  3. We record lives lost – from police reform advocate John Crew to the artist Yolanda Lopez, and civil servants and advocates like Buck Delventhal and David Inocencia.

We do this to inspire you, to make better informed and more engaged residents – to make the city better. So, no party is needed. Your donations are better spent on reporting.

I hope you agree!

Lydia

Today’s News

Explore: San Francisco’s 2023-25 budget

After months of political wrangling and intense number-crunching, the final budget for San Francisco’s coming years is here.

A Cultural Mission, dancing through the dog days

In San Francisco, the dog days of summer are often the best of times. Theaters, clubs and other venues brim with performances.

Immigrant teens sell art to make their ‘dreams come true’ at Disney

“We grew up watching Disney movies,” Iraheta said in Spanish, eyes lighting up.

SNAP

The camera

By Michael Santiago
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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.