The Weekly Illumination — Issue 1

August 24, 2013 Josh Wolf

Welcome to the first issue of The Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters.

The newsletter is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog. In this week’s Illumination we’ll explore the future of journalism education, social media and the effectiveness of paywalls.

Get Civilized, Online Comment Reform

In a previous column I wrote about how a San Francisco Alt-Weekly turned off its comments for a week. That experiment is now over and the sea of frothy comments has returned to the San Francisco Bay Guardian following its completion. In that column I spoke to how anonymous comments create an often-hostile environment where users show little restraint.

That phenomena is detailed in a new article by Mark Manson, a popular blogger and self-help author. In his essay, Manson points to four elements of online communication that warp our perception and drive people to act in ways they never would in person.

Next month the Huffington Post hopes to kick out the trolls — or at least coerce them into behaving — by eliminating anonymous comments, reports Gigaom.

“We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up internet,” said Arianna Huffington at Hubspot’s Inbound 2013 conference. “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats.”

Social Media Gets Stickier

Facebook and Twitter may already be ubiquitous on the internet, but their reach across the Web continues to grow. It’s been possible to embed individual tweets for a while, but now anyone can embed public Facebook posts as well. This means that stories can now include the posts themselves, which will increase the company’s visibility outside of Facebook’s domain.

The New York Times has launched a one-off experiment to identify excerpts that readers can automatically share on Twitter, reports Poynter. Throughout the article, Dave Itzkoff’s The God of ‘SNL’ Will See You Now, there are sentences marked by a subtle gray highlight and the familiar Twitter logo. When someone clicks on these highlighted sentences a tweet is automatically prepared with that text and a link to the article that users can share with their followers. Although the New York Times has no plans to roll out these Twitter highlights to more of its stories, the newspaper does have a redesign planned next year.

There is even an app that will turn on these Twitter highlights across the entire Web. When the plug-in is enabled, clicking on a sentence on any web page will turn it into a tweet automatically. It’s called Save Publishing, and although I haven’t had a chance to test out the software, which is still in alpha-testing, it does seem like an interesting idea.

***

It can be almost impossible to correct the record when a mistake is made on social media, especially Twittter. When tweets go viral, they become nearly impossible to track and follow up tweets to clarify or correct information never have the same reach. A new app called Retwact is working to find a solution, but the app developers are finding themselves hampered by Twitter’s policies, reports newslab.org.

***

More than 80% of the world isn’t on Facebook. For some of us that’s a personal decision, but for the millions of people around the world without internet access it just isn’t possible to take part in the virtual world that Mark Zuckerberg created. But on Wednesday the company announced its plans to bring the social network to the rest of the world by “drastically cutting the cost of delivering basic Internet services on mobile phones,” according to the New York Times.

“If we were just focused on making money, the first billion people that we’ve connected have way more money than the rest of the next six billion combined. It’s not fair but it’s the way that it is,” Zuckerberg told CNN in a story about internet.org, the initiative he formed in partnership with six other tech companies. “We just believe that everyone deserves to be connected and on the internet.”

Tear Down this Wall

While recent reports show that pay walls are working to generate more revenue for sites like The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle has decided to terminate its experiment of charging to access content online. Unlike the semi-permeable Times site, which permits users a limited number of articles they can read each month (and an unlimited amount if reached by search engine), the Chronicle created a new site at SFChronicle.com to house its original reporting.

Meanwhile the incredibly well-trafficked SFGate.com became populated almost exclusively with wire content and teasers to the stories behind the pay-wall. The experiment ended after four months, despite generating nearly half a million dollars, according to an interview with former editor Phil Bronstein.

The Future of Journalism Education

Although a new report shows that more than a quarter of recent journalism grads wish they’d studied something else in school, the same report shows that more graduates are landing full-time work after graduation. In 2009, only 56% of graduates found employment within eight months of graduating; that number is now at 66% for 2012 grads.

In recent years, many journalism schools have modeled themselves after teaching hospitals. Rather then spending time lecturing about the basic principles of journalism, more and more schools are having their students start reporting immediately. The faculty at these schools will often act as editors of online publications to create an environment similar to the traditional on-the-job training that introduced so many cub reporters to newspaper reporting.

But researchers David Ryfe and Donica Mensing of the University of Nevada’s Reynolds School of Journalism have authored a new paper that suggests journalism schools should instead adopt an entrepreneurial model for education, reports Nieman Lab. One example of an entrepreneurial model for education is Stanford’s D.school, a multi-disciplinary graduate program focused on using radical collaboration to tackle real problems. Corey Ford, the CEO of Matter.VC, used to teach at the d.school and is now employing a similar process to help launch media start-ups through his accelerator.

Entrepreneurship may offer the best chance for journalists — and journalism — to succeed, but for many students an internship can be a solid rung toward reaching a successful career. For DiAnelea Millar, who just wrapped up an internship at the Los Angeles Times, the experience gave her hope for the future. As she explains, her internship the previous summer at the Times-Picayune wasn’t quite as inspiring.

For anyone about to start a Fall internship, Alex Laughlin, the influence director for the University of Georgia’s Online News Association Student Group, has prepared a list of five things any intern can do to help make a good impression. Although Laughlin’s advice is mostly common sense, the post does a good job of emphasizing how important it is for interns to wow their new colleagues. After all, when dozens of people are jockeying for the same job those connections can lead to interviews that might not otherwise happen.

Job(s) of the Week

Each week, The Illumination will include links to jobs, grants and fellowship opportunities. If you are hiring or know someone who is, send me an e-mail and I’ll gladly list it here. If you’re looking for a job, let me know what kind of work you are looking for and I’ll try to post anything I come across that could be a good fit.

Meanwhile, if you happen to live around Morristown, New Jersey or are looking to move to the Garden State, the Aggregation Reporter is looking for an “Internet Sleuth with Journalism Background.” The job itself appears to be a typical general assignment position, but who wouldn’t want to see their employer print “Internet Sleuth” on a business card.

Hangout Sept. 12 to Discuss Future of JTM

For over a decade JTM has hosted unconferences around the country. We are now looking toward how we can grow as an organization.

Should we continue to focus on hosting physical gatherings? Should we move into online gatherings? Or should we take our energy and nonprofit status and launch a whole new initiative?

Please join us, Thursday Sept. 12 at 1PM Pacific Time (4PM Eastern) for a Hangout discussion on the future of JTM.

Coming Up: Disclosure

On Monday, the Illuminations blog will examine the topic of disclosure. Does transparency trump objectivity? What should journalists disclose and when is it not necessary?

If you have thoughts on this issue or any of the other topics covered in this issue of The Illumination then please feel free to leave a comment or to send me an e-mail.

What’s Working for You?

August 16, 2013 Josh Wolf

By looking at what’s working today, we can get a glimpse of what the future of journalism will look like and play a role in shaping that future.

This column has reported on the successes of both for-profit and non-profit journalism organizations, advances in media technology and new legislation to protect the reporter’s privilege.

But I want to know what’s working for you and to share it here so that we can collaboratively sketch out what’s effective and assess why some approaches succeed while others falter.

What new tool or process adopted at your work environment over the past year could you not imagine living without?

What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?

“We’re trying to create more and better journalism,” said Mike Fancher, a JTM Board member and retired editor of The Seattle Times. “What would make people want to participate? Who knows something that I don’t know? And what do I know that they would want to know?”What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?

On behalf of Journalism that Matters, I invite you to join in a conversation about these questions. You can either leave a comment or you can post your response as a blog entry on Journalism that Matters.

Illuminations Blog, JTM News

A Shield Law for the 21st Century News Ecology

August 11, 2013 Josh Wolf 3 Comments

The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to place a federal shield law before the full Senate, but some senators disagree about who should qualify for its protections.

A shield law establishes a reporter’s privilege against testifying about their sources and unpublished materials. Nearly every state in the country has some sort of shield protections, but there is no federal shield law and very limited protections for journalists in federal court.

On May 16, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced The Free Flow of Information Act of 2013. The bill is very similar to the previous failed attempts to establish a federal reporter’s privilege, but unlike the Free Flow of Information Acts of 2007, or 2009, or 2011, this time the bill would protect journalism by the people as well as that of the mainstream media. Schumer’s bill covers anyone “with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes on such matters.”

With more and more stories being generated by freelance reporters and concerned citizens, Schumer’s bill recognizes that if it is to protect the changing news ecology it must be inclusive of those engaging in journalism whether they are working on salary, freelancing, or self-publishing on the Web.

But during a Senate Judiciary Meeting earlier this month, three senators on the committee proposed revisions that would radically change when the law would apply.

On Sept. 12, the Judiciary Committee will consider 37 amendments to the Free Flow of Information Act, 27 of which were introduced by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced eight amendments, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced two. All three senators seek to change who would be covered under the law.

Feinstein seeks to not only narrow the definition of who would qualify for protection, but to explicitly define those people as journalists — Schumer’s bill uses the term “covered person.” Under Feinstein’s amendment, a “journalist” is “a person who is, or on the relevant date, was, a salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information by means of…”

In other words, unless you are on salary, you’re not doing journalism until you have a contract in hand.

In the same proposed amendment, Feinstein goes on to also define a journalist as a:

(i) a person who — at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought, had the primary intent to investigate issues or events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, and regularly conducted interviews, reviewed documents, captured images of events, or directly observed events;

(ii) obtained the news or information sought in order to disseminate it by means of an entity set out in subparagraph (A)(i) of this section; and

(iii) either—
(I) would have been included in the definition in subparagraph (A) of this section for any continuous three-month period within the two years prior to the relevant date;
(II) had substantially contributed, as an author, editor, photographer, or producer, to a significant number of articles, stories, programs, or publications by an entity set out in subparagraph (A)(i) of this section within two years prior to the relevant
date; or
(III) was a student participating in a journalistic publication at an institution of higher education (as defined in section 102 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 6 1002)) on the relevant date;

If I’m parsing this language correctly, even if you meet the first requirement, you still don’t qualify unless you would have met that criterion for a continuous three-month period at some point over the last two years, otherwise you’re not a journalist — legally speaking at least.

In a recent interview with Amazon, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the nature of all occupations, including journalism, has changed.

“We have increasingly resigned ourselves to a ‘winner-take-all’ economy — again, driven a lot by technology and globalization, where folks at the very top are doing very well and the broad middle class of people, people trying to get into the middle class, are having a tougher and tougher time,” said President Obama. “It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper. Now you have a few newspapers that make a profit because they’re national brands, and journalists are having to scramble to piece together a living, in some cases as freelancers and without the same benefits that they had in a regular job for a paper.”

Feinstein’s amendment does makes some allowance for a reporter who has “substantially contributed” to a “significant number of articles,” but doesn’t define what comprises a “significant number.”

It is encouraging to see that Feinstein’s proposed amendment includes student journalists within its protections. Last year I spoke at the Berlin Freedom of Expression hosted by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy on why protections for the press should include student journalists and independent reporters. It’s nice to see some of the issues I raised resonating, but such a complex equation to determine who should be covered does nothing to insure that the journalists protected are the responsible ones.

Sen. Sessions more than two dozen amendments would drastically reduce the scope of the shield law. Not only would Sessions version of the bill no longer require the courts to exhaust all alternative sources for information before subpoenaing a journalist, his version would also exclude the reporter’s privilege in cases involving classified information, grand jury leaks, crimes involving violence and several other scenarios. Although his version of the shield law might still protect journalists in cases involving civil suits between private parties, the scope of its protections would be otherwise quite limited. It would not have covered any of the recent cases where journalists were facing contempt citations in federal court.

Most of Sen. Cornyn’s amendments involve minor language changes, but one of his amendments would exclude journalists from invoking the reporter’s privilege to protect the identity of a government official who has released personal information about a private citizen. Another of Cornyn’s amendments would rely on the court’s interpretation of the First Amendment alone to determine who would and would not qualify for its protections.

In California — where I live — the reporter’s privilege is now part of the state constitution. It offers robust protection for journalists no matter the medium, with an exception in criminal cases where the reporter’s privilege must be balanced against the defendant’s right to a fair trial.

The state shield law has successfully protected both traditional reporters as well as bloggers against contempt. In 2006, the California Courts of Appeal found that the publisher of Think Secret, a now-defunct Apple rumors site, qualified for protections as a journalist under the California Shield Law. Since Apple chose not to appeal that ruling to the state supreme court, it is now a commonly held belief that bloggers and other citizen journalists can successfully invoke the state shield law in California.

Every state’s laws will approach the issue of who is covered differently, but The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press has compiled detailed information about the status of the privilege in all 50 states. Only a few states have established whether unpaid contributors and self-publishing bloggers are protected through case law, and even fewer address the issue legislatively.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee introduces a shield law to the full senate following next months meeting, that law — if successfully passed — will likely serve as a guide point to the state courts and legislators as to how their own shield laws should be interpreted or amended.

We do not yet know what the future of journalism will look like or who will be its practitioners. But we do know that more and more journalism is being produced by people who would qualify for protections under the language that Sen. Schumer has proposed.

But some of these journalists would not maintain that protection if the language Feinstein has proposed is adopted, and if Sen. Sessions gets his way the bill would be a shield law in name only.

A robust and inclusive federal shield law is on the horizon, but the decision to keep it that way will come down to the 18 people on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Starting Monday, I plan to call the offices of all 18 senators. I encourage you to do the same.

Disclosure: I spent 226 days in a federal prison for refusing to comply with a grand jury subpoena relating to my work as a journalist. If Sen. Schumer’s bill had been law at the time, it is likely I would not have been found in contempt of court.

Illuminations Blog, JTM News

A Radical Approach to Comments

August 3, 2013 Josh Wolf 4 Comments

Vociferous comments are the hallmark of a modern news Web site, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian is no exception. But for one week the newspaper has shut down their anonymous online battleground.

Instead, readers were invited to attend a community meeting that the Guardian hosted on Wednesday, which I reported on for a companion piece to this column. The newspaper has also directed its readers to Tweet at them or to comment on its Facebook page “where it’s tougher to troll anonymously,” said Editor Steve Jones in a Guardian blog post.

Anonymous comments have been a problem for almost every newspaper, but the issue is magnified at the Guardian, a 47-year old institution that was sold by its founder last year. Long-time editor Tim Redmond was pushed out in June, and the city itself is under a tumultuous change that some say dwarfs the transformation the city experienced during the last dot-com boom.

Some online publications have chosen to rely on Facebook to handle their comments, but such a move would surely trigger a backlash from some Guardian readers. At Wednesday’s meeting one woman criticized the Bay Guardian for sending people to Facebook to RSVP for the meeting, and Jones said that the company has significant privacy concerns that he himself has reported on in the past. The role that Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies have played in driving up housing prices and spurring on massive construction projects while transforming the demographics of the city doesn’t help either.

The community forum seems like a great step forward in creating a real conversation with its readers and the people of San Francisco, but the one-off meeting was attended almost exclusively by those who already love and cherish the Guardian. I’d love to see the forum expanded into a monthly event, though I don’t think regular meetings would do anything to bring the newspaper’s critics into the conversation. Free food might do the trick though.

Another substitute that someone suggested at the meeting was to increase the number of letters published in each edition of the paper. Jones seemed enthusiastic about the idea and had previously posted a call for letters on the Guardian’s blog. But letters to the editor are closer to public comment at a government meeting than they are to real conversation. Typically the editor rarely prints a reply to the comment, and I’ve never heard of a newspaper publishing a reader’s response to a response.

While there are plenty of reasons why anonymity is crucial to journalism, it’s unclear why it’s necessary for online commenters to be anonymous, at least in the U.S. The first commenting systems were not anonymous because it was better. They were anonymous because it was much easier to avoid building the tools that would be necessary to verify the identity of a user. Until a few years ago, it wasn’t really feasible to build this sort of online commenting system.

Disqus is one of the most popular 3rd-party commenting platforms, and it allows someone to sign in directly through Disqus or through either their Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts. But the Disqus software also tracks what pages its users are visiting on the Web, and raises just as many privacy concerns as Facebook.

How can the SF Bay Guardian, and other sites, quell trolling commenters without devoting hours to moderating all incoming comments or relying on a 3rd party company that may use the data gathered in an unsavory way?

In the absence of an answer, the Guardian has temporarily unplugged their comments and called on their readers to speak to them directly. When the experiment is over I’ll ask Jones what they’ve learned through this experiment; I plan to share those findings in a future column.

Journalism News, JTM News

Fighting for the Soul of San Francisco

August 2, 2013 Josh Wolf 3 Comments

On Wednesday, the editorial leadership of the San Francisco Bay Guardian sat down with their readers to discuss how they should move forward after the paper’s owner forced out its long-time editor Tim Redmond in June.

Depending on who you talk to, Redmond was fired, or possibly resigned, after he refused to fire three people the paper’s new owner targeted for termination. After 31 years at the paper, Redmond’s ouster quickly resonated across the San Francisco progressive community, and there was a growing perception that this would be the end of San Francisco’s seminal alternative weekly after being in print since 1966.

For some people the news wasn’t surprising. The San Francisco Print Media Company, which also owns the San Francisco Examiner, purchased the Guardian last year. When the same company bought the SF Weekly a few months later, people began to wonder if the new owner really intended to maintain two competing weekly newspapers. The news that Redmond was out only served to enforce this theory.

“Since then we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions. The biggest question is where do we go from here,” said news editor Rebecca Bowe at the beginning of Wednesday’s event. “We realized that what really made the most sense was to just sit down and do some listening and that’s why we wanted to have a community forum.”

After opening up the forum, Bowe introduced Bay Guardian Editor Steve Jones, who had originally been passed over for the position after Redmond’s departure but had recently led successful negotiations with The San Francisco Print Media Company to restore the Guardian’s autonomy.

“I’ve been at the Guardian since 2003. The reason I wanted to work at the Guardian is because it’s a very special place and it practices a kind of journalism that used to be really important in this country that we’ve sort of lost recently. Journalism that has a perspective. That has a value system,” said Jones. “I’ve always seen the Guardian as really fighting for the soul of San Francisco. We’re fighting a battle to win here. To create an informed and engaged citizenry. … I think we were all tempted to follow Tim out the door and I think ultimately where we came down for all of us is that the Guardian is really more than any individual.”

Before turning the forum over to the audience, Publisher Marke Bieschke, who had previously worked as the paper’s managing editor, offered three questions that he said the staff was particularly interested in exploring.

“The first question is, ‘What would you like to see the Guardian cover more of?’ … The second question is, ‘What do you feel is missing in Bay area journalism right now?'” said Bieschke. “We’re looking towards your ideas to kind’ve hit the refresh button on journalism in the Bay Area in general and to bring up some of the great journalism that’s happening right now.”

Finally Bieschke called on the 100 or so people in the audience to consider what voice the Bay Guardian should adopt moving forward.

“Are we being too strident? Do you miss our stridency?” said Bieschke. “Are we not being in-depth enough, are we being too hip?”

Not surprisingly, when it came time to pass the mic around the room, Bieschke’s questions quickly took a backseat to whatever the Guardian’s readers had come to discuss.

“The concern I have, and I think I’m not the only one, is with The Guardian, The Weekly, and the Examiner under the same management, under the same ownership. Am I right folks?” said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a beloved poet and legendary San Francisco figure who turned Bob Dylan onto cannabis more than 50 years ago, whose comments generated applause. “I think we now have a new layer of management who have come, who are bound to have their own priorities, their own agenda.”

Although Diamond Dave had left by the time Todd Vogt, president of the San Francisco Print Media Company, spoke on his plans for the Guardian, much of the audience seemed relieved to hear the paper wasn’t on the chopping block.

“I make a commitment to all of you tonight that so long as I have any role, or involvement, or ownership in the San Francisco Print Media Company, the Guardian will continue to be published as a print product, continue to have a presence online; that it will continue to maintain its progressive voice, led by progressives managed by progressives, with a diversity of voice, a diversity of comment and content,” said Vogt. “I think that this is a great opportunity for the Guardian to re-engage with the progressive community, to reengage with new citizens of San Francisco — progressive or not — and to reinvigorate the voice that they’ve had for so long.”

Some people did make requests for more coverage around the issues they hold closest. Several others called for more investigative reporting, but the overarching theme throughout the conversation was that the San Francisco Bay Guardian is a progressive institution whose decline parallels the city’s tech-driven transformation.

“What gets me upset is when I see 40-story buildings. When I see the zoning laws change all over the city so that wealthy condominiums, or condominiums for the wealthy, will go up and push so many of us out,” said one participant who had previously written for the Bay Guardian. “When I hear the phrase “Soul of San Francisco,” the soul of San Francisco is for an immense loving rebellious warm community, so diversified it was a blessing on this earth and infected this whole earth. Now if the new ownership of the paper has that within themselves — like a lit candle — a lit candle for the soul of San Francisco, we will do well.”

As anyone over 30 who grew up in the Bay Area knows, this is not the first time the city has fought to hold onto it’s identity, but there is a growing fear that this could be the last battle for the soul of San Francisco.

“I grew up with the Guardian from the 90s as a young-adult,” said City Supervisor John Avalos, one of at least four elected officials who attended the forum. “What was really great about the lead-up from the 90s to the year 2000 was that there was a whole effort in San Francisco, and a recognition, that the city was changing — up and underneath us — and that we actually could not keep up with the high cost of living, and we were seeing run-away development displacing people all across San Francisco.”

“The year 2000 was one when there was actually a resonance between what was happening in San Francisco and what the Guardian was also reporting on,” said Avalos. “I think now we’re reaching that tipping point all over again. … The city is actually getting away from us — again — and the Guardian can play a role in helping to underscore what’s happening, and helping people to direct us into ideas and points of view and efforts of organizing to resist that which is going on.”

Although the staff are keenly aware of the changing demographics within the city, the Guardian has struggled to engage this new wave of San Franciscans. Shortly before the forum was about to begin, the woman sitting next to me shrewdly pointed out how hardly anyone at the forum appeared to be from the tech community.

“There’s this whole new group of these young tech-savvy, relatively apolitical, vaguely libertarian, kids in the city. And yeah, we want to find out ways to speak to them,” said Jones, the editor for the Bay Guardian. “We’ll try anything. We really want to expand our readership and we think — not just for our own business model — we think its really important for the soul of the city to win over a lot of these young people that don’t understand the history of the city and are not engaged in its political dynamic.”

Josh Wilson, a JTM alum who attended the Amherst, DC, and Silicon Valley gatherings, suggested that these “tech-savvy, relatively apolitical, vaguely libertarian, kids” might be more receptive to the Guardian’s message if the paper were to step away from its perspective-based reporting that — at times — can resemble the left-wing’s answer to Fox News.

“I just wanted to propose that there might be a difference between the San Francisco Bay Guardian as a voice for progressive politics versus the San Francisco Bay Guardian being a source of reporting on issues of interest to progressive politics,” said Wilson. “The former, being a voice, might not be as strong because the issues, and the politics, become so inward-turning that they might not be as valuable to people who want issues in their daily lives covered with depth and fairness.”

The words “Raising Hell Since 1966,” are now written across the top of every issue of the Bay Guardian, and they have repeatedly demonstrated this mantra. But what is the future of the Bay Guardian — and the Soul of San Francisco — if the new denizens of the city have no interest in raising hell and would prefer to leave the politicians alone?

“I think it’s really on San Franciscans to decide what kind of city you want to fight for, and to fight for that kind of city,” said Supervisor Avalos. “It’s going to take not just reading the Guardian, but actually meeting face-to-face with our residents, with our neighbors and with our community members to really create that change. But we are in really dire need right now.”

Disclosure: I have previously contributed to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and I have a story scheduled to run in the Aug. 7 edition of the paper.