Bay City News staff live and work throughout the region, allowing us to connect with the communities we serve. We value diversity, equity and inclusion in both our reporting and our hiring practices to more accurately reflect the region. For more on how to join our team, check our freelancing guide.
Kat Rowlands Founder & Publisher
Katherine Ann Rowlands is president of Bay City News Service and founder of Bay City News Foundation, which publishes LocalNewsMatters.org. She has worked as a journalist for 40 years, covering news in the Bay Area, Central California and overseas.
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.
Aly Brown has freelanced many news articles and been on staff at several Bay Area news outlets, including the Brentwood Press, the Livermore Independent and Bay City News. Her first nonfiction book, THE LAST UNEXPLORED PLACE ON EARTH, was
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.
As web manager of LocalNewsMatters.org, Chloe oversees the presentation of all content on this nonprofit, public service site and coordinates related social media for @baynewsmatters. She also leads a team of data journalists at Bay City News who
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.
Dan McMenamin runs the daily news operation at Bay City News Service, directing coverage of the 12-county greater Bay Area. He has worked for Bay City News Service since 2008 and has been managing editor since 2014 after previously serving as BCN’s
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.
Jeverly Halili manages bookkeeping, donor stewardship and administrative tasks at Bay City News, leveraging her expertise in administrative support and accounting. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Accountancy, she initially started her career as a
Senior Bookkeeper and later progressed to the role of Financial Analyst within government agencies.
Dan Rosenheim Editor & Director of BCN Business Development
As business development director, Dan Rosenheim engages with existing clients of Bay City News and works to attract new ones.
Dan also edits major enterprise projects for the BCN newswire and for Local News Matters. A graduate of Wesleyan
University’s College of Letters, Rosenheim reported for the Hammond (Indiana) Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, becoming city editor and managing editor at the Chronicle. He then moved to broadcast, where he was vice president and news director at KRON-TV and KPIX-TV. He joined Bay City News in 2020.
Ciara Zavala was a 2024 Dow Jones News Fund intern contributing as a General Assignment reporter and assisting with audience engagement. She earned a journalism degree with a minor in media production and entrepreneurship from High Point University.
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.
Leslie Katz has been covering the diverse Bay Area arts scene since 1988, when she compiled Bay City News’ Leisure Log entertainment calendar. She also worked as a news reporter and editor at BCN before enjoying exciting stints overseeing arts and
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!
Kathy Pfrommer works as an executive assistant and calendar editor for the Bay City News Datebook, one of our most important products. Relied upon by most media in the region, the Datebook is a verified daily listing of important events around the
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.
Ray Saint Germain has been a Bay Area journalist since his 1991 start at the Antioch Daily Ledger/Pittsburg Post Dispatch. He served in varying roles at later iterations of the news organization, including the Contra Costa Times, East Bay Times and Bay Area
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.
Autumn DeGrazia is a photojournalist and recent graduate of San Francisco State University. During her time in university, she spent semesters studying in Arles, France and Madrid, Spain developing her journalism skills while working with
translators and conducting interviews in French and Spanish.
She has attended the Missouri Photo Workshop, The Alexia Fall Workshop, and The Eddie Adams Workshop, where she had an opportunity to work with editors and visual directors of different news publications.
DeGrazia has covered local stories in San Francisco and enjoys sharing stories of Bay Area residents. She primarily focuses on photography with an interest in documentary and long-form storytelling. She is the acting photo editor at Bay City News.
Gabe Agcaoili is an overnight editor for Bay City News Service. He began his career as a journalist in his college days in Manila, writing for the religion and Filipino beats of his campus paper before he became editor of the religion beat. His
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.
James Ambroff-Tahan is a classical pianist and longtime journalist who covers Bay Area performing and visual arts, including opera, orchestras, ballet, modern dance, contemporary musicians and artists, theater, music festivals, film festivals and
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.
Diane Bakunawa serves as the web producer and is responsible for curating and copyediting daily news content published on Local News Matters. She also manages some of Bay City News’ social media channels and
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.
Francine Brevetti is a San Francisco native who started her journalism career in New York in the late 1970s with America’s oldest daily, The Journal of Commerce, covering finance and foreign trade for the Knight-Ridder publication. From 1985 to
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.
Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on climate, environment, infrastructure and housing in Marin County. She first came to Bay City News as a California Local News Fellow, a statewide local news initiative
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.
Joe Dworetzky is a second career journalist at the Bay City News Foundation. He practiced law in Philadelphia for more than 35 years, representing private and governmental clients in commercial litigation and insolvency proceedings. Joe served as City Solicitor
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.
Sydney Fishman is a full-time multimedia journalist based in Mendocino County and is part of the California Local News Fellowship program hosted by UC Berkeley. She likes to focus on harm reduction policies, mental health issues, and cannabis legalization.
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.
Sue Gilmore writes about arts, entertainment and books for Local News Matters. She has been working in journalism for more decades than she cares to admit, focusing in more recent years on the coverage of books, classical music and dance and the defense of written
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.
Kathleen Kirkwood works as an editor for Bay City News Service and also writes about environment and science issues. A journalist with three decades of reporting and editing experience in the Bay Area, she covered the community
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.
Charles Lewis III is a journalist, arts critic, and artist. He was born and raised in San Francisco and has frequently written about art, race, and the intersection between the two. His reports and op-eds have appeared in the San Francisco Examiner
, 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.
Janis Mara does reporting and editing for Bay City News and Local News Matters. She has worked at the Oakland Tribune, the Marin Independent Journal and Adweek, winning California News Publishers Association and Digital First Media awards for video
, investigative work, business coverage and education writing.
Alise is a general assignment reporter with a focus on covering government, elections, housing, crime, courts and entertainment in San Francisco and on the Peninsula. Alise is a Bay Area native from San Carlos. She studied
history at University of California, Santa Cruz and first started journalism at Skyline College’s school newspaper in San Bruno. She has interned for Bay City News and for Eesti Rahvusringhääling, or Estonian Public Broadcasting. She has covered everything from the removal of former San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus to the divisive battle over the Great Highway on San Francisco’s west side. Please send her any tips.
Randy Myers hails from a small Northern California town and has been ensconced in the Bay Area for nearly three decades. He’s eager to turn 30 this coming year. Yeah, right. He’s been a sports writer, sports editor, editorial writer, features editor, arts and entertainment
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.
Susan Nash reports on legal matters for Local News Matters and also writes about issues relating to aging and technology. She has recently been a Fellow at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, where she studied the interaction between soci
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.
Kiley Russell writes primarily for Local News Matters on issues related to equity and the environment. A Bay Area native, he has lived most of his life in Oakland. He studied journalism at San Francisco State University, worked for the Associated Press and the
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.
Jerome is a web producer and multi-media journalist who manages The Mendocino Voice website and writes the weekly newsletter. He has a background in reporting and editing and also does special project work for LocalNewsMatters.org and Bay City News
Jean Schiffman is a longtime freelance arts and entertainment writer with a focus on theater. In the past, she co-founded a downtown San Francisco theater company, edited Theatre Bay Area’s monthly magazine, worked as a theater publicist and acted
onstage. Her handbook “The Working Actor’s Toolkit” was published by Heinemann.
Katy St. Clair got her start in journalism by working in the classifieds department at the East Bay Express during the height of alt weeklies, then sweet talked her way into becoming staff writer, submissions editor, and music editor. She has been
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.
Denise Sullivan is an independent arts reporter and cultural worker, specializing in under-reported stories on people and communities at the intersection of arts and social justice matters. Author of music biographies including “Keep On Pushing: Black Power
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
Sherman Turntine is a part-time special projects editor for Bay City News and Local News Matters. Some of his duties include working with high school journalists as part of the Contra Costa Youth Journalism mentoring program. He previously worked a
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.
Steve Brooks was in 2024 selected as a California Local News Fellow, a competitive program designed to strengthen local news reporting in California, headed by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is an award-winning journalist who has
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.
Marcy Burstiner works as a projects editor for Bay City News Foundation. She is a former assistant managing editor of financial site The Deal and was a senior reporter for thestreet.com, where she covered Silicon Valley. She is the author of “Investigative Reporting:
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.
Caroline Crawford has worked as music historian in UC’s Bancroft Library since 1987, documenting the lives of composers and jazz and blues musicians. She has written for Opera magazine and Opera News and played piano with Bread and Roses for many
Thomas grew up in San Diego in the late 20th century and later earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Global Studies from CSUMB. He spent five years as a local broadcast journalist on California’s Central Coast, covering local news and hosting talk shows focusing on
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.
Pete Young is a supervising editor for Bay City News Service. He worked on the metro desk of the New York Times and as California editor for Bloomberg News. He was executive editor of the Monterey
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.
Amelia Williams is a bilingual San Francisco journalist covering culture, local history and cannabis. Her work has appeared in Leafly, SFGate, and SF Chronicle Datebook among others. She contributes feature stories to Local News Matters.
Lydia Sviatoslavsky is an Oakland-based journalist and digital media consultant. She has previously penned arts & culture content for Audiofemme, Broke-Ass Stuart, and Collectors Weekly. She is a recent
Rowena Gonden has worked as a features writer and news reporter for the Bay Area News Group, where she won awards from the California News Publishers Association and covered stories on nearly every beat in eastern Contra Costa County from public safety, health
and religion to education, local government and the Delta.
Gina Gotsill, a longtime arts writer, covers a variety of topics for Bay City News. She studied journalism at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, and her writing life has spanned news writing, editing, corporate communications, marketing and playwriting. She co-authored
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.
Lin Due began as an editor and writer in high school and never swerved from that path. She was senior editor at the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper with a circulation of 80,000, then edited the Ecology Center’s magazine before serving as editor of the
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.
George Alfaro is a photographer based in West Marin who joined Bay City News as a California Local News Fellow. He is interested in covering environmental injustices and socioeconomic inequality through labor, housing, and social welfare. From the
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.
Roger Coryell is a reporter covering California’s North Bay — Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, and Napa counties. He specializes in breaking and underreported stories on water, the environment, public health, and local government. A fifth-generation journa
list, Coryell brings a working knowledge of the region’s communities and a plain, ground-level style to beats that larger outlets often overlook. He lives in Sonoma County and reports across the four-county region for a range of regional outlets.
Andres Jimenez Larios is a graduate student at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, where he focuses on multimedia storytelling as member of the Dean’s Fellowship program and Mark Litke International Reporting Fellowship. A Southern California
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.
Liz O’Connell is a journalist and part-time editor with the Mendocino Voice. Originally hailing from Pennsylvania, she fell in love with the West Coast after attending the University of Arizona and currently lives in Mendocino—though she remains a
loyal Eagles fan.
She began her journalism career at The Anson Record in Anson County, North Carolina, where she covered local news and community issues before moving into business journalism at the Charlotte Business Journal. She later joined Newsweek, where she has worked since 2023 as a pet reporter, covering animal welfare, wildlife and research. Outside of work, she enjoys photography, spoiling her dog and two cats and falling more in love with the Mendocino Coast every day.
A Stanford University student with interests in investigative and data journalism, Kayla is particularly interested in criminal justice reporting and uncovering compelling human stories through deep research.
Another Craig Newmark School of Journalism student, Valerie is looking forward to sharpening her deadline reporting skills while getting to know the Bay Area. Her interests include climate adaptation, community issues and LGBTQ+ reporting.
A student at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism, Lloyd is passionate about arts, culture and stories from Black communities. He hopes to grow as both a reporter and photojournalist this summer.
A master’s student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago, Hans comes with a background in news product management, audience research and editorial strategy. He is excited to deepen his passion for local news and expand his skills in audience development and digital product innovation.
A recent UC Berkeley graduate in English literature and political economy, Katie is interested in environmental reporting, local politics, arts and culture, and the ways public policy shapes communities. After writing for The Daily Californian, producing news coverage at KALX Radio, and reporting on climate and sustainability issues for EARTHDAY.ORG, she is eager to continue building her reporting experience.
A UC Berkeley student from San Francisco, Kelcie is passionate about public-service journalism, politics, and local government. She enjoys tackling complex topics and making them accessible to readers.
A graduate student at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism, Joshua is a storyteller, documentary filmmaker and multimedia producer with experience across journalism and media production. He is passionate about using compelling narratives to connect communities, amplify diverse voices and explore issues that impact everyday people.
A Mendocino County journalist and Cal Poly Humboldt graduate, Savana has experience across television, radio, print and digital media. She is dedicated to telling stories that matter to the communities she serves.
A Northwestern University student and Oakland native, Adam has extensive experience covering sports but is excited to branch into topics such as transportation, urban planning and criminal justice closer to home.
Julian Caballero
Julian Caballero is a student at San Francisco State University where he studies photojournalism. Julian currently serves as a photographer for Xpress Magazine. He is interested in covering housing, educational access, and environmental justice.
A graduate student at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism in New York City and a retired physician, Josephine brings a unique perspective to health and science reporting. She’s also eager to expand her skills in audio journalism and long-form storytelling.
A lifelong Bay Area resident and recent UC Berkeley graduate, Eric is inspired by journalism’s ability to connect communities and hold power accountable. He plans to continue building his reporting skills before beginning graduate studies this fall.
A Stanford University student studying mathematics and creative writing, Christopher is drawn to deeply reported, human-centered stories that help readers see their communities in new ways. After reporting for The Stanford Daily, he is eager to build his local reporting experience and tell stories about people and issues that are often overlooked.
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