|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
One of my first assignments as an intern at the Palo Alto Weekly was to approach strangers on University Avenue and interview them for the paper’s “Streetwise” feature.
I was terrified.
My task was simple: Pose the same question to five people and return with coherent quotes. Fortunately, the editor sent a photographer along. Without that chaperone, I might still be standing on the sidewalk, working up my courage.
Three decades later, I’m returning as CEO and publisher of the Embarcadero Media Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Weekly, The Almanac, the Mountain View Voice, the Redwood City Pulse and our three sister publications in the East Bay.
I have considerably more experience now. But this week, I’m starting with much the same assignment: Get out into the community. Ask questions. Listen carefully.
That internship helped set the course of my life. Journalism gave this somewhat-introverted college student permission to approach people, enter unfamiliar worlds and ask questions that might otherwise seem a little nosy. It took me from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times to the International New York Times, from California to Hong Kong, Beijing and back again.
My ties to the Peninsula have endured through all those travels. I graduated from Stanford with a degree in human biology and returned in 2016 as a John S. Knight journalism fellow, then worked as a case writer at the Graduate School of Business. My parents have lived in Palo Alto since 1999, and my father spent more than two decades serving on the city’s Historic Resources Board.
So this is both a homecoming and a new beginning.
I’ve had the privilege of leading newsrooms —The Desert Sun in Palm Springs and, more recently, The San Francisco Standard. Those were two different newsrooms, and two different communities. But in both cases, I found journalism offered an extraordinary opportunity to make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
Community news helps us understand decisions about our schools, neighborhoods and public money. It introduces us to people we might otherwise never meet. It can expose wrongdoing, celebrate achievement and help neighbors find common ground.
That work depends on our relationship with you — which is why I’m starting by listening rather than announcing grand plans. I’m asking our employees what we do well, what gets in their way and where we have opportunities to improve. I want to ask our readers similar questions.
What do you turn to us for? What are we missing? Whose experiences deserve more attention? Are our websites, newsletters and newspapers easy to use and useful in your daily life? What would make you recommend us to a neighbor? And if you’ve stopped reading regularly, I’d especially like to understand why.
The communities we serve are changing, as are the ways people find and share information. We need to be willing to experiment, improve our products and reach people who don’t yet see us as part of their lives. Living alongside so many of the people driving technological change here makes that work unusually interesting.
But the foundation of our work remains human: showing up, talking to people, checking facts, pursuing questions and being accountable for what we publish.
Election season brings that responsibility into sharp focus. Heading toward Election Day, we’ve dropped the paywall on our online election coverage so everyone can access the information they need to make informed choices. Please read it, use it and share it with friends and neighbors.
Producing that coverage free-of-charge requires real work — interviewing candidates, examining records, following campaigns, hosting in-person forums and explaining the decisions facing voters. An hour of reporting time costs us at least $30. If you value our voter guides and other election-related information, I hope you’ll support us with a tax-deductible donation here. If you’re already contributing, thank you — you’re helping make reliable local information available to our whole community.
Our newsroom is not part of a hedge-fund-owned corporate newspaper conglomerate headquartered on the other side of the country. Nor are we the pet project of a billionaire with unlimited resources. We are a local, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom, rooted here since 1979. Our 501(c)3 model gives us an opportunity to build a future in which strong local journalism is sustained by the people it serves. I’m grateful to founder Bill Johnson, my predecessor Adam Dawes, our board and our staff for the work that has brought us to this point.
Now I want to hear from you. Send me your ideas, questions and constructive complaints. You can email me at publisher@embarcaderomedia.org, or call me at 650-223-6588. Tell me where I should go, whom I should meet and what I should understand about our community.
And if I approach you on the street with a notepad in hand, I promise I’ve gotten a little better at introducing myself.
