Reflecting On One Year Of The Fellowship
By Sebastian Miño-Bucheli
Sebastian Miño-Bucheli, in the background on the right, is on scene to get a story.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been one year since I started to work with Coastside News through the California Local News Fellowship, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.
A year ago I was freelancing to make ends meet to make rent in the San Francisco Bay Area, which might sound familiar to anyone leaving university right now and not being able to find a job right away. Things looked really bleak as I thought about leaving the industry that was experiencing massive layoffs and publications going out of business.
In a 2023 study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, researchers found that there were 204 counties in the U.S. without any local news outlet and that 1,562 counties have one remaining news source, a weekly paper. California is a bit different with four counties that don’t have news sources while 11 counties only have one.
For the Coastside, there’s just one weekly-turned-daily digital publication that is able to bring extensive and in-depth community coverage that other dailies or media companies can’t unless there’s a big headline. That’s us.
One example of this, on my first day, former Coastside News Group publisher and editor-in-chief Clay Lambert gave me a list of community members I should meet as soon as possible because they were the ones that are the headline-makers. He wasn’t wrong, since everyone on the list was going to be integral to my two-year stay on the Coastside as I was covering agriculture and rural communities with no experience.
In my first year I grieved, mourned, cried, celebrated and danced with the community. I owe it to the fellowship program for giving reporters like me a shot working with local or community news. Currently, there are multiple similar efforts going on nationally. Illinois is using employment tax credits, scholarships and a first of its kind required 120-day notification period for selling a publication. Or recently, several Los Angeles-based media leaders and philanthropists came together to launch a nonprofit, boost local news for Angelenos and create a region-wide reporting team.
With a year left on the Coastside, I feel hopeful about the industry and what’s to come. As for the readers, I have a lot of news stories I want to cover and help it stand out through other means like radio or video.
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