Lydia Chavez is the founder and executive editor of Mission Local, a hyperlocal and bilingual news site that covers the Mission District in San Francisco. Lydia was born and raised in Albuquerque and her first reporting job after graduating from Columbia’s Journalism School was with The Albuquerque Tribune (now closed). She then went on to work at TIME Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. In 1990, Lydia started working at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which was where Mission Local originally was founded as a project in 2008.
In 2014, Mission Local became independent. The outlet publishes articles about city corruption, police misconduct, and, more recently, how the coronavirus is affecting the Mission District majority Latino population.
To donate to Mission Local, click here.
To read some of their most recent (and very excellent) investigative work, check out their most recent stories, “Special Report: Structural engineers’ warnings over city’s mandatory retrofits have gone unheeded for years,” and “Special Report: ‘It could become a San Bruno’ — the explosive problem buried beneath San Francisco homes,” both published by Joe Eskenazi.
Lydia’s shoutout was to some great Bay Area outlets that haven’t been mentioned yet on the podcast, Cityside, a local journalism nonprofit that oversees two great hyperlocal outlets, Oaklandside and Berkeleyside. Lydia also gave a shoutout to Open Vallejo, a nonprofit newsroom that covers police misconduct.
