Our Staff, Contributors and Interns

After a year as a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, in 2018 she bought Bay City News, a wire service that since 1979 has been the backbone of local news coverage in the region, and founded an affiliated nonprofit to support public service journalism. Kat is also a past president of Journalism and Women Symposium and co-founder of WomenDoNews, a project to get better representation of women journalists in Wikipedia. She is president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition. A Berkeley native, she got her start in journalism as an intern for Bay City News. Reach her at kat@baycitynews.com.

published by Macmillan in 2023. Her background also includes two years of grant writing and reporting. She excels in building teams with a focus on innovation and problem-solving.

use data to report on and create visualizations to show trends throughout the Bay Area related to health, equity and demographics. Since 2020, she has also created several Info Hubs to help readers filter relevant information on COVID-19, wildfires and library resources. Most recently she has led an effort to experiment with AI in the newsroom.

San Francisco bureau reporter. A UC Davis graduate, he came to BCN after working for a newspaper and nonprofit in the Davis area. He handles staffing, including coaching of our interns, day-to-day coverage decisions and management of the newswire. BCN has won numerous awards from peer and industry associations under his stewardship.

Senior Bookkeeper and later progressed to the role of Financial Analyst within government agencies.

San Francisco bureau reporter. A UC Davis graduate, he came to BCN after working for a newspaper and nonprofit in the Davis area. He handles staffing, including coaching of our interns, day-to-day coverage decisions and management of the newswire. BCN has won numerous awards from peer and industry associations under his stewardship.

Ciara interned at The Greater Sacramento Economic Council, The Colorado Sun, and Fox 8, gaining experience in digital media, newsletter writing, web design and news production. Originally from Southern California, she now calls Sacramento home. In her free time, she enjoys reading, true crime documentaries and experimenting with pasta recipes.

culture stories at ANG Newspapers (now Bay Area News Group) and the San Francisco Examiner from the 1990s into the 21st century. She has answered queries on the Fleischmann’s Yeast bakers’ helpline and had publishing jobs at the greeting card company Palm Press as well as Chronicle Books. Look for her in a theater, club or concert hall audience, hopefully in a preferred aisle seat!

greater SF Bay Area. She curates and edits submissions from dozens of government, nonprofit and legal entities each day. Before coming to BCN, she worked as an editorial assistant for Bay Area News Group and the Oakland Tribune.

News Group. He managed daily photo assignments, editing and multi-media production, among other jobs. Since joining Bay City News, he has built a new photo department for the organization, overseeing acquisition, quality control, verification, staff training and mentoring and multi-media projects.

professional career began at Manila Bulletin, one of the oldest newspapers in the Philippines and Asia, as an editorial assistant. He then worked for ABS-CBN, the largest media company in the Philippines and oldest television broadcaster in Southeast Asia, before its license to broadcast was shut down by Congress during the Duterte administration for political reasons. During Gabe’s stint at ABS-CBN, he wrote about foreign affairs, particularly issues regarding the South China Sea and the ICC’s probe into the Philippine drug war.

art exhibitions. He has written for several Bay Area publications in addition to Bay City News and Local News Matters, including the San Francisco Examiner, Oakland Tribune, Nob Hill Gazette and Adobe Create magazine.

occasionally creates graphics and illustrations. Prior to joining Bay City News, Diane worked as a news producer and writer for the award-winning Philippine newscast, 24 Oras, where she produced stories on politics, climate, health, and the economy, among other topics. She was also part of the team that handled months-long coverage of the 2022 presidential election for GMA News.

1997, as a freelance business journalist in Hong Kong, she contributed to U.S., U.K., Australian and Asian English-language dailies and magazines, covering finance, foreign trade, shipping and travel when Hong Kong was anticipating its return to People’s Republic of China sovereignty. She wrote “Welcome to China,” a guidebook commissioned by the China National Tourism Administration. In 1997 in San Francisco, she secured a commission to write the history of America’s oldest Italian restaurant, Fior d’Italia. From 1998 to 2008, as a business reporter for the Oakland Tribune, she covered entrepreneurship, personal technology, banking and the Port of Oakland. Today she writes clients’ biographies, books about business and conducts workshops for writers. She is crazy about her dog Rosa and cat Pearl.

spearheaded by UC Berkeley. Ruth has a masters from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (’23) and has reported on the contaminated watersheds of the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and the Everglades. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.

for the City of Philadelphia under Mayor Ed Rendell and from 2009 to 2013 was one of five members of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission with responsibility for managing the city’s 250 public schools. He moved to San Francisco in 2011 and began writing fiction and pursuing a lifelong interest in editorial cartooning. Joe earned a Master’s in Journalism from Stanford University in 2020. He covers legal affairs, tackles investigative projects and does cartooning for Local News Matters.

Her primary interest lies in exploring stories related to the aftermath of the War on Drugs. Sydney has worked with various outlets, including KALW Radio, KCBS Radio, The Oaklandside, Berkeleyside, and East Bay Express. Her work has also appeared in Bushwick Daily, Bklyner, and other New York publications. In 2021, Sydney became an award-winning podcaster for her work on NYU Furman Center’s podcast, In Our Backyard, which highlights the housing crisis in Inwood, New York City.

English. She is also a sharp copy editor and lover of Bay Area culture. She worked for the Contra Costa Times and Bay Area News Group and lives in Orinda.

and city hall for the Oakland Tribune as a reporter before becoming city editor at the Trib. She was breaking news editor on the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Ship fire story for the Bay Area News Group.

, the East Bay Express, SF Weekly, and his Local News Matters pieces have been reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle. His art reviews have been quoted by the most renowned organizations in the Bay Area. As a playwright, director, and actor, he’s had the pleasure of working with local titans ACT, Berkeley Rep, and Cal Shakes, as well as renowned independent houses the EXIT Theatre, PianoFight, and The Flight Deck. He can be found online at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.

, investigative work, business coverage and education writing.

Thailand taught her the consequences for democracy when living in a society with strict laws against free speech. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history, Alise took courses in journalism at Skyline Community College to learn how to write for news. As the Chief Copy Editor on Skyline’s student-run newspaper for the 2023-24 school year, Alise gained editing and managing experience leading a team of reporters. She covered hyperlocal stories affecting her campus such as the rise in food and housing insecurity. Alise wants to focus on data journalism.

editor, online news producer and for many years a film reviewer/journalist, including author of Pass the Remote on Local News Matters. He adores the vibrant, dynamic energy of the Bay Area arts and entertainment scene. He divides his time between being a writer and being a group exercise instructor/trainer.

al media and democracy, and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity, where she worked on digital literacy and access for older adults. Susan practiced law in Los Angeles for 35 years, representing individual and corporate clients in civil and criminal cases. She is now a Giants fan and lives in Mendocino.

former Contra Costa Times, among other outlets. He has covered everything from state legislatures, local governments, federal and state courts, crime, growth and development, political campaigns of various stripes, wildfires and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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onstage. Her handbook “The Working Actor’s Toolkit” was published by Heinemann.

a columnist in the East Bay Express, SF Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. Starting in 2015, she begrudgingly scaled the inverted pyramid at dailies such as the Vallejo Times-Herald, The Vacaville Reporter, and the Daily Republic. She has her own independent news site and blog that covers the delightfully dysfunctional town of Vallejo, where she also collaborated with the investigative team at Open Vallejo. A passionate advocate for people with developmental disabilities, she serves on both the Board of the Arc of Solano and the Arc of California. Her story “A Very Special Concert,” about Huey Lewis’ loyal fanbase of developmentally disabled listeners, garnered her an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing and inclusion in Da Capo Press’ “Year’s Best Music Writing” book, edited by Mary Gaitskill. She lives in Vallejo.

Music From Blues to Hip Hop,” and editor of “Your Golden Sun Still Shines: San Francisco Personal Histories and Small Fictions,” Sullivan worked as a music columnist at the Contra Costa Times, has contributed features to the San Francisco Chronicle and written for most all of the now-defunct Bay Area free weeklies and online outlets since the dawn of the internet. “SF Lives,” the award-winning column she wrote for San Francisco Examiner during the city’s gentrification crisis years of 2018-22 continues as a series of public, livestream discussions at Bird & Beckett Books and Records. She teaches community writing classes with Litquake’s Elder Project and is at work on her own poetic memoir of life as a San Franciscan, then and now. More at denisesullivan.com

t Newsela, an edtech startup. He has also worked for the Bay Area News Group (San Jose Mercury News), EdSource, San Francisco Public Press, San Jose Spotlight and KQED Science.

been recognized by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalism and the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has been a journalist since the COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin State Prison (since renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center) in the summer of 2020. He served as the editor-in-chief of San Quentin News in 2023.

From Premise to Publication” (Holcomb Hathaway) and teaches investigative reporting at Humboldt State University. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she now also works as a mentor and editor at News Decoder.

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global press freedom. He earned a Master’s in Journalism from Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York City. Thomas enjoys basketball, comedy, and turtles.

County Herald and taught reporting and editing as an adjunct professor at New York University. As an advisory board member of the Alfred Friendly Foundation, he mentored journalists from nations with underdeveloped media including Egypt, Malawi, Namibia, and the Czech Republic.

graduate of Mills College in Oakland.

and religion to education, local government and the Delta.

She co-authored a business book, Surviving the Baby Boomer Exodus, in 2010, and wrote and self-published a Spanish/English children’s story, A Spider on the Step, in 2014.

Kensington Outlook, a monthly newspaper. She has written hundreds of articles on wildlife, the environment, education, sports, gardening, and other topics for alternative newspapers, magazines, and Home and Garden titles. She won the national food-writing award from the Association of Alternative Newspapers as well as a Project Censored award for an article on gay and lesbian teenagers. She was also awarded the first Excellence in Bay Area Journalism award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She has published three novels and a nonfiction book, Joining the Tribe. That book and one novel, High and Outside, received American Library Association Best Book of the Year awards. Other pursuits include gardening, wildlife, and endangered breeds of livestock; she co-operated a small market garden and sold at the Mendocino Farmers Market for several years. She divides her time between Laytonville, the East Bay, and Santa Rosa.

Sun, Sonoma Magazine, Wine Enthusiast, The North Bay Bohemian, The Press-Democrat, The Huffington Post and she’s appeared on KQED, WNYC, the Weather Channel, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and ABC Nightly News. Her reporting on the 2017 Sonoma County wildfires was called “groundbreaking” by Michael Krasny of KQED Forum for her use of social media and reliable sourcing. You may have seen her photography in The Washington Post, Motorburn, The Christian Post, Buzzfeed, Frommers, Lonely Planet, the Utne Reader, numerous public radio and television programs, ESPN, The National Park Service, and more. In what little free time she has, Sarah enjoys road trips, motorsports, reading dense history books and contributing to Wikipedia. Learn more about her at sarahstierch.com and email her at sarah@mendovoice.com.

open fields of the Central Valley to the underbelly of San Francisco, Alfaro’s work is rooted in human experiences that speak to broader social affairs. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Oaklandside, KneeDeep Times, Richmond Confidential, the Bancroft Library, and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

native, Andres previously earned his undergraduate degree in political science and Latin American languages at UC Berkeley where he had the opportunity to study in Washington D.C., Madrid, and Mexico City. His reporting interests include transportation, aviation, infrastructure, and along with political decisions that impact LGBTQ and marginalized communities.

Sokone Media TV in Senegal, and Paddington Arts in London, covering a wide range of stories from politics and trials to arts and international culture. George recently produced a mini-documentary investigating homeless encampment sweeps in Berkeley and is fluent in French. During his internship, he is focused on video storytelling.

Magazine. Her reporting consists of culture, local politics, and is experimenting with sports photography this summer to expand her skills in visual storytelling.

and hopes to contribute data-driven content as well as support newsroom initiatives related to podcasting and product development.

ing with social-first reporting approaches.

Quarterly, Stanford’s literary magazine. During her internship, she is focusing on criminal justice and the legal system, along with abortion care in California.

Pulse. Her reporting interests include education, Indigenous affairs and the legal system.

KRON 4, and the Bay Area Reporter. Specializing in arts and culture, this summer, they have broadened their reporting to include politics, environmental stories and other local issues, even making their very first podcast, all while continuing to explore their passion for the arts and history.

identities beat at The Daily Pennsylvanian. This summer, Hannah is reporting on housing, incarceration and the arts.

native, Andres previously earned his undergraduate degree in political science and Latin American languages at UC Berkeley where he had the opportunity to study in Washington D.C., Madrid, and Mexico City. His reporting interests include transportation, aviation, infrastructure, and along with political decisions that impact LGBTQ and marginalized communities.

on equity, immigration, civic engagement and the intersection of culture and conflict.

SciencesPo’s student newspaper. Raised in the Bay Area, she is reporting this summer on immigration and the arts.

served as a senior reporter for The Chicago Maroon, and his reporting spans politics, arts, and sports. Austin is reporting and contributing to business development projects this summer.