Media Deserts: Local Ethnic Communities Face a Crossroads
A report on a roundtable forum
Preliminary Report, May 1, 2016
Journalists and students grapple with the news media’s shortcomings during symposium.
-- Photo by Erin Liu
By Jon Funabiki, Venise Wagner and Laura Moorhead
Journalism Department, San Francisco State University
Media Blind Spots and Media Deserts
On February 12, 2016, 18 prominent news media and community leaders joined in a roundtable
forum to explore whether news media outlets in the Silicon Valley are adequately serving local
ethnic communities, immigrant groups and the poor. The conversation was surprisingly frank
and candid. The answer, simply stated, is “no.” The participants blamed many factors—new and
old, simple and complex—for the new media’s inadequate performance. They spoke of “media
blind spots”—groups and places that journalists simply failed to see—as well as “media
deserts”—geographic neighborhoods that lacked a media voice of their own. They warned that
the coverage gap imperiled vulnerable communities, likening it to the chasm that separates the
haves and have-nots in the Silicon Valley—one of the most diverse, affluent and technologically
advanced regions of the United States.
Despite this dismal conclusion, the media leaders ended the day on a note of optimism and
hope. They took part in a brainstorming session that yielded concrete ideas for experiments
and initiatives that could blunt the trends. These experiments could provide communities with
the news and information resources that they need, shine a spotlight on hidden issues that
need attention, or close the gaps that separate journalists from communities. Significantly, the
ideas called on journalists and their news outlets to join forces and to collaborate, a concept
that was foreign to many reporters and editors who were used to cut-throat competition during
healthier times for the media.
In our continuing investigation, we are now exploring the feasibility of implementing one or
more of the experiments that were proposed during the forum. Our goal is to determine
whether we can stimulate news outlets to launch initiatives that help vulnerable communities
address the issues that concern them.
Background
In 2015, staff members of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation conducted an inquiry into
the particular role that community and ethnic media play, or can play, in helping people
address pressing community issues. The staff members sought the assistance of Jon Funabiki, a
professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, who previously has conducted
initiatives with mainstream, ethnic and community media locally and nationally.1 The
discussions led to the awarding of a grant for a study that included two parts: A roundtable
forum of Silicon Valley news media leaders to examine the questions, and a small series of
modest experiments to test whether it would be possible to move organizations to take action.
Prof. Funabiki enlisted the assistance of two colleagues, Associate Professor Venise Wagner and
Assistant Professor Laura Moorhead.2
For clarity and context, some background about the importance of the ethnic media is offered
here.
Mainstream news media generally are recognized as news outlets that target a large general
audience or consumer base. Examples in the Silicon Valley would include The San Francisco
Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and KPIX TV. Community news outlets, such as the Palo
Alto Weekly, target a smaller geographic neighborhood or region. Ethnic news outlets target a
specific ethnic group and may be published or broadcast in English or the home language of the
1
See the website of Renaissance Journalism at www.renjournalism.org. Relevant initiatives include The
Equity Reporting Project, the Detroit Journalism Cooperative and Learning Lab.
2
Biographies attached.
group. Ethnic news outlets may or may not be based within a specific geographic area. For
example, Univision is a national television network targeting Spanish speakers, whereas El
Tecolote, a bilingual newspaper, serves Latinos in San Francisco’s Mission District. As an outlet
that is both ethnic and community focused, El Tecolote also falls within a category that media
researchers at the University of Southern California have dubbed geo-ethnic media.
The USC researchers have extensively studied ethnic media in the Los Angeles area. They have
concluded that “ethnic media are at the heart of the everyday practices that produce and
transform ethnic identity, culture and perceptions of race.” Moreover, “ethnic media serve an
important function in connecting immigrants to news and events in the home country
(connective function), while also orienting the newcomer to their new community and new
country (orientation function).”3
Throughout the history of the United States, ethnic media outlets have played important civic
and political roles. Often, ethnic media emerge because the mainstream news media ignore—
or are overtly hostile to—an ethnic group. This is why the black press and Spanish-language
newspapers came to being starting in the early 1800s. Time and again, these news media
outlets helped to shape political discourse and alter the course of history, as when the Chicago
Defender urged African Americans to join The Great Migration to the North, or more recently in
2006 when Spanish-language radio and television urged Latino Americans to hit the streets in
protest of U.S. immigration policies.4
The influence and reach of the ethnic media has been well documented. In 2003, San Francisco
State University’s Public Research Institute conducted a multilingual survey (English, Spanish
and Chinese) to determine how Bay Area residents obtain their news. (The study was
commissioned by Jon Funabiki when he served as deputy director of Media, Arts & Culture at
The Ford Foundation.) The study showed that 80+ percent of Latino and Chinese adults rely on
ethnic media sources, either exclusively or in combination with mainstream media. Among
African Americans, 59 percent rely on ethnic media sources.5
But recent evidence points to threats to the health of community, ethnic and geo-ethnic media.
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Virtually all news operations—from mainstream to ethnic--have suffered economic
losses as a result of both the long economic recession and the crippling of the
advertising-based business model that had supported journalism for more than a
century.
3
Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies, Matthew D. Matsaganis, Vikki S.
Katz and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Sage Publications, 2011.
4
News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, Juan Gonzalez and Joseph
Torres, Verso, 2011.
5
News Ghettos, Threats to Democracy and Other Myths About Ethnic Media, Public Research Institute,
San Francisco State University, 2003.
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A number of ethnic news outlets in the Silicon Valley have closed. El Mensajero, a
Spanish-language newspaper that circulated in many parts of the Bay Area is among the
most recent. VTimes, a Vietnamese newspaper in the San Jose area, is another loss.
Some ethnic media have become such bare bones operations that they cannot produce
local news. Two Filipino newspapers published in Daly City, for example, consist
primarily of news from the Philippines with only a few articles about local issues and
events.
The digital revolution has become a two-edged sword. Many ethnic media outlets lack
the capacity to ramp up to using the Internet and mobile technologies to their fullest
capacity. While immigrants can use their iPads to find news about their home countries,
this means that they bypass local ethnic media.
Longstanding leaders of ethnic newspapers, such as Mary Ratcliff of the San Francisco
Bay View, worry that younger journalists won’t pick up the torch because they see such
a dim financial future for the ethnic media. Other communities, such as East Palo Alto,
have been without their own newspapers for decades.
To deepen our understanding of the current situation in the Silicon Valley, the research team
decided to convene a cross section of media leaders who could share their experience and
expertise. The group of participants was carefully selected to include mainstream, ethnic and
community media outlets; newspapers, television and radio; and for-profit and nonprofit
operations. Some of the invitees had decades of experience, others were relative newcomers to
the profession and offered fresh perspectives. Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s Vice
President for Diversity in News & Operations,6 facilitated the forum. Some faculty and students
from the Journalism Department attended and participated in the discussions. We asked four
questions:
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In general, what have Silicon Valley news media institutions gained and lost during the
past decade of change?
Are the needs of the Bay Area’s most vulnerable immigrant, minority and poor
communities being met?
What are the barriers and challenges that contribute to an equity gap in the Silicon
Valley’s news media ecosystem?
What can be done to close news media gaps, and how can we ensure that Silicon
Valley’s news media ecosystem is more inclusive?
The process proved fruitful because we harvested both insights and inspiration. Despite the
dire state of media serving ethnic communities, there are viable possibilities for media outlets
in Silicon Valley to serve their most vulnerable members of the community. There is support for
change and leadership on this vital issue.
6
Biography attached.
Tallying Gains and Losses in Silicon Valley’s News Media
In an effort to identify and understand vulnerable communities in Silicon Valley, round-table
participants considered what groups were either at risk or already not being served adequately
by local media organizations. To begin the day’s conversation, participants were asked to
identify what have news media institutions in the Silicon Valley gained and lost over the past
decade as they have adapted traditional journalism practices to changing demographics, social
trends, technologies and business challenges?
In regard to gains, roundtable participants identified the affordances of social media in reaching
different communities within Silicon Valley. Social media create opportunities for fast, new
forms of journalistic collaboration that often blur the lines between traditional journalism and
communities. A massive range of people, organizations and perspectives can now be reached
and a two-way flow of information, from media organization to audience, is possible. Black
Twitter, in particular, surfaced as a powerful example of people taking social media as their
own platforms and creating a collective of individuals who maintain a community — sometimes
virtual, sometimes physical — that is responsive to news and media outlets and the world at
large.
Yet, social media as a means for consistently and effectively reaching and communicating with
at-risk or overlooked communities in Silicon Valley has fallen short. Round-table participants
pointed to losses and emerging issues still to be addressed by local media institutions, largely
benefitting from online tools that enable people to create and share content. While these
organizations may be expanding their current audiences through social media, they are not
necessarily using these tools to meet the needs of more diverse local communities.
Among the most notable losses is the continued lack of diversity in terms of both content and
staff among media organizations covering Silicon Valley. As one participant explained, diversity
is “missing at every level of the media” and is not reflected in the general coverage of the area
and its communities. While new media organizations have emerged over the last ten years,
their focus has been on tech and from an “upper-class tech point of view and does not keep in
mind … the issues faced in the Silicon Valley community.”
Other participants pointed out that media organizations in Silicon Valley miss opportunities to
cover inequality in the area, despite audiences expressing a desire for such coverage. As one
journalist and radio host said, “We’re at an exciting time right now. There is so much focus on
issues like inequality, race, the prison system. When we look at exit polls from the recent
primary and caucus, the overwhelming majority of voters say inequality is at the top of their
list” for coverage. “People are hungry for this information—that’s really good, a gain.” But, the
journalist added, media organizations show “a lack of imagination in bringing on new voices.”
Participants highlighted difficulties in reaching ethnic and underrepresented communities and
identified continued cuts in resources and staff for reporting and news organizations as a
contributing factor. Several participants explained that their organizations often struggled to
maintain their current coverage and lacked the needed resources to review, revamp and
expand their reporting efforts in the Bay Area. For these participants, their media organizations
were “trapped” in their status quo.
A strategic communications specialist working in public health highlighted the difficulty in
reaching ethnic and underrepresented communities and stressed the need to consider new
ways to reach these groups. For some communities, he explained, social media both encourage
and hinder media consumption by immigrants. Ethnic groups can consume their native, or
homeland, news through social media and the Internet. Yet, doing so may encourage them to
bypass or simply miss their ethnic media in Silicon Valley. Thus, residents new to the area may
not fully develop roots in their local community and gain important local information and news
that could affect their daily lives. Likewise, media organizations may miss an opportunity to
include these area residents in their stories.
Related to participant concern about cuts in resources and staff for reporting is the continued
loss of “robust reporting from a previous era.” Participants pointed to a flattening and
“generification” of journalistic storytelling in which stories become indistinct and nearly
interchangeable in their commonness. “Content is being aggregated” and that contributes to
“online content that’s less meaningful to readers,” a participant said. Another suggested that
this flattening of storytelling led to “the institutionalization of media as a voice.” Others argued
that this contributed to the “rapid decline in policy reporting” and, ultimately, the loss of two
crucial tenets of journalism: “real investigative coverage” and the press as “public watchdog.”
All this, points to what one participant called a “market failure in community journalism,” which
exacerbates the current inadequate coverage of ethnic and underrepresented communities. As
the participant explained, “news targets profitable communities, leaving vulnerable
communities unspoken for.”
The current funding approach by many foundations has not adequately helped nonprofit media
organizations looking for alternatives to market-based funding. One “major problem,”
explained a participant, is “the inability of funders to stay with success.” This leads to a “lack of
collaboration and funders to invest in media.” Funders, as participants agreed, tended to
finance one-time experiments and then move on to the next novel effort somewhere else. Such
an approach stymies emerging projects and collaboration, allowing “a lack of community
among media outlets” to continue and perhaps grow. It may also contribute to an overly
competitive media landscape in the Bay Area.
Several participants oversaw decades-old publications that covered ethnic communities. For
these individuals, a “new guard,” willing and able to continue producing their publications or to
launch new ones that address the needs of these communities, remains missing from the
current publishing landscape.
Recognizing the Underserved and Undercovered
The Bay Area is a region of juxtapositions. The signs of wealth are obvious and evident, but just
under the surface, there are several groups who are left out of coverage, left out of sight. The
groups can be broken down into four categories:
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Socially marginalized or isolated
Economically marginalized or isolated
Culturally marginalized or isolated
Geographically marginalized or isolated
While many news organizations have made great strides in being more inclusive in their
coverage, particularly including more African Americans in the news, there are so many other
groups and subgroups that are being left out of the narrative.
For example, when news organizations cover immigration, missing from the discussion is the
impact of U.S. policies on Asian immigrants. We hear exhaustive debate about immigration as it
relates to immigrants from Latin America, but we don’t hear about the lives of recent
Vietnamese immigrants, or Chinese immigrants. We also don’t hear about Brazilians who are
making their home here.
Other voices missing from overall coverage include Native Americans, poor communities–rural,
like Half Moon Bay, and urban, San Jose–and the disabled. The discussion here focused on
those struggling with mental illness.
We also don’t see enough stories about the underemployed, those who hold several minimum
wage jobs to get by.
Stories about the impact of the criminal justice system on minorities, primarily on African
Americans, are getting a lot of play. But we don’t see much on the families of those who are
incarcerated, those formerly incarcerated, or those facing charges.
Geographically, Bay Area news outlets don’t spend enough time covering Newark or Union City,
two communities that have become the home of those displaced by gentrification. How are
those communities coping with the new denizens? In fact, what do we know about people
displaced by gentrification? Where are they going? How are they managing in their new cities
and how has their presence changed the culture and demographics of their newly adopted
cities? East Palo Alto is another community that rarely gets coverage unless there is crime, or in
relation to poor school performance.
What do we know about the digitally deprived? Who are they and are they living next to or
among those who are digitally privileged? What are the policies and social forces that keep this
group marginalized and how does this gap in access affect people on a daily basis? If people are
digitally deprived, what should news organizations be doing to help plug them into the local
public forum?
When news organizations cover some of these communities they are often demonized,
dehumanized, or portrayed as the “other.” In other instances, news stories fail to explain the
root causes of problems and to examine systems that give rise to inequity. Narratives about
these groups tend to be clichéd and reinforce stereotypes. One example that was mentioned
was a local newspaper story on homelessness. The story failed to speak to one homeless person
and those who were described were shown as examples of drug addicted and mentally ill
people who were depraved and unhygienic. The story did not talk to the invisible homeless
such as elderly women who are homeless, families experiencing homelessness, or the working
homeless and youth homeless. The view is so narrow, that audiences can’t help but feel
compassion fatigue.
While news organizations are good at showing a sliver of the problems, we rarely see
innovators–the artists, non-profit leaders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, churches or other
places of worship–that are creating solutions to some of these emerging problems.
Barriers to Coverage of These Communities
Many of these communities are culturally isolated, some by way of language. Some journalists
don’t know how to penetrate such insularity. Fear also plays a role here. Fear on both sides.
Those who have been burned by the media, are not so sure journalists are to be trusted. If their
stories get out in the news, how will this impact their lives? Also fear on the part of journalists
who lack cultural proficiency and an ability to place themselves in situations unlike their own.
Other participants were more blunt. They felt too many journalists were either lazy or lacking in
creativity or enterprise in their approach to finding these untold stories.
Structural problems within the industry have also constrained new ways of seeing potential
stories. The beat structure in most newsrooms means reporters are looking for stories that fit
within their assigned areas. Because today’s social problems tend to be complex and layered,
it’s often difficult for reporters to see the larger holistic story with a birds-eye view.
Resources also continue to be a problem. Just recently, the Bay Area News Group announced
that it was consolidating its chain of papers in the East Bay and on the Peninsula into two
dailies. The Oakland Tribune, the Contra Costa Times, the Daily Review in Hayward, and the
Argus in Fremont, will merge into one paper called the East Bay Times. Each of these areas will
see a weekly insert with hyperlocal news every Friday. On the Peninsula, the San Mateo County
Times and the San Jose Mercury will merge to become the Mercury News. The consolidation
will mean a cut in staff of 20 percent.
While this decision has shocked many in the Bay Area, the realities of running a news business
with the expectation of a particular profit margin, places significant pressure on newsrooms
which now find themselves even more hobbled in their ability to deploy reporters and cover
their communities fully.
Since disruption of the news media business began 15 years ago, reporters have faced the
difficult task of doing more with less time – thinking faster, reacting to the day’s events quicker,
and recording the official version of events. Under these conditions, it is difficult to cultivate
deep stories with impact. And still the 24/hour news cycle churns on and news outlets feel
compelled to keep up.
Imagining Solutions
The participants in the roundtable forum broke up into three small groups to develop potential
solutions to the criticisms and weaknesses in Silicon Valley journalism that they had identified
earlier in the day. During the rapid brainstorming sessions, each group was asked to identify a
community problem that they wanted to tackle and a potential solution or experiment that
could be conducted by journalists and their news outlets. Each group had a diverse set of
participants, which no doubt stoked the conversations.
The participants offered a number of novel experiments that responded to two powerful sets of
ideas that emerged during the day. One participant, a veteran editor, commented that a critical
weakness in journalism today is that each newspaper, television station or other news outlet
tends to operate independently and in a silo. He called this the “media islands” phenomenon.
While it may have promoted healthy competition during good economic times, it doesn’t work
in the current era, which sees news outlets struggling for survival and forced to deal with
dwindling resources. The solution, the participant suggested, was greater collaboration among
news outlets so that they can each benefit from the other’s strengths. He said that the Bay
Area saw an example of the strength of collaboration when more than two dozen reporters,
photographers and editors from a wide variety of news organizations banded together to
investigate the assassination of Chauncey Bailey, a prominent African American journalist in
2007 while doing an expose on the Black Muslim Bakery. The concept of collaboration in
journalism is still so new, that students who sat in on the roundtable forum proposed that the
university create a new course on collaborative journalism.
The second idea evolved from a string of remarks offered by a number of participants. It started
when one journalist questioned why we often think of news coverage as being “about” a
community, rather than “by” a community. This is the philosophical division that historically has
set apart the mainstream news media and the ethnic news media. Under this rubric, the
mainstream newspaper may do a story “about” the African American community, while the
African American newspaper positions itself as belonging to the community that it covers. As
the roundtable conversation progressed, two additional distinctions emerged: news coverage
that is produced in concert “with” the community and “for” the benefit of the community.
Taken together, some of the solutions combined these notions to offer a journalistic approach
that is “about, by, with and for” the community. Such an approach envisions a partnership of
some kind between the journalist and the community, which is closer to the ethnic media
model.
Each of the solutions or experiments that were proposed by the three break-out groups
incorporated aspects of the collaborative and the “about, by, with and for” journalistic
approaches. They were:
The Mobile Editorial or Storytelling Workshop
This proposal builds on the successful model of Youth Radio, the Oakland-based project that
trains young people to produce their own radio stories, which are distributed to a variety of
major news outlets, such as National Public Radio and The Huffington Post. Trainers, operating
out of a mobile studio, would go to different community locations and teach residents to
develop their own stories about themselves and the issues that are important to them. The
residents’ stories could be distributed via participating news outlets.
This program would empower impacted communities to tell their own stories and, possibly,
influence the policies that affect them. The group that proposed this idea said it could have
been helpful when the City of San Jose debated the controversial “Crime Free Multi-Housing
Program” that would enable landlords to evict tenants who have been arrested for a variety of
crimes. The program was designed to reduce crime, but opponents said it would victimize lowincome tenants. The Mobile Editorial or Storytelling Workshop would tap into stories from the
grassroots and bring “more richness” to news coverage of the policy debate.
The Healthy Housing Initiative
This proposal would attempt to reframe the way journalists and the public view gentrification
and displacement, which is a dominating issue in the San Francisco Bay Area. The members of
this group felt that gentrification has largely been covered as an economic issue resulting from
widening income gaps created by the influx of new technology companies and their high-paid
employees. Instead, this group said that news coverage should also consider the many ways
that gentrification and displacement contribute to health issues. “The problem is that
displacement is a public health problem,” said a communications specialist. “In San Francisco,
when people get evicted from apartments, usually what happens is that people get stacked up
in illegally converted units, and it’s just shocking how deplorable the living conditions are.” The
stories might show how displacement has forced families to move far away from their doctors,
relatives and other forms of support. Families would be asked to share their personal stories,
which might be solicited by medical organizations and community centers and offered to news
media outlets to improve their reporting of the community. In today’s digital environment, any
of the stories could be formatted into a variety of media formats, such as articles, videos,
slideshows and podcasts. Beyond the dissemination of these stories, nonprofit and community
organizations could utilize the stories to influence public policies.
Solving Homelessness
The third group declared, only half in jest, that they planned to solve homelessness by
organizing a collaboration of news outlets to address homelessness as a human rights issue.
The outlets would share content, story ideas and resources so that they could cover the
homeless as it affects all communities and keep the pressure on public officials until
homelessness is eliminated. The initiative would elicit solutions from the community. “We
would frame it from the perspective that we would not take this fatalistic attitude that there
always have been homeless people and there always will be homeless people,” said one
participant, the founder of a nonprofit journalism group. One policy objective might be to get
more regions to follow the lead of Santa Clara County, which temporarily lifted some policies so
that emergency tent cities could be erected. News outlets would commit to continuing the
initiative for at least a year to keep the public conversation going.
Moving Forward
With these three ideas, the energy among the participants turned 180 degrees. Many of the
participants commented to the organizers that they were interested in pursuing the ideas or at
least being kept informed of progress in this initiative. Accordingly, the project organizers have
begun to reach out to participants to determine whether their news outlets are willing to take
part in developing a concept for working together on important community issues. The
participants’ enthusiasm seemed to send a signal that they would react favorable to acts of
leadership on a matter of vital importance to communities in the region.
JOURNALISM DEPARTMENT
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94132
Media Deserts: Local Ethnic Communities Face A Crossroads
February 12, 2016
San Francisco State University will conduct a roundtable forum to explore whether local ethnic
communities are being adequately served by Silicon Valley’s news media institutions. The
forum comes as local communities are swept by demographic and economic change and as
news media institutions (large and small, for-profit and nonprofit) weather many challenges.
Selected media leaders, experts and community representatives are being asked to share their
experiences and expertise to explore the following questions:
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What have news media institutions in the Silicon Valley gained and lost over the past
decade as they have adapted traditional and treasured journalism practices to changing
demographics, social trends, technologies and business challenges?
What are the media needs of the Bay Area’s most vulnerable communities, particularly
ethnic and low-income residents? Are these needs being met, or are trends contributing
to the formation of “media deserts” in one of the most technologically and diverse
regions of the nation?
What are the barriers and challenges that contribute to an equity gap—falling along
racial, socio-economic, generational and geographic fault lines—in the Silicon Valley’s
news media ecosystem?
What can be done to close news media gaps, and how can we ensure that Silicon
Valley’s news media ecosystem is more inclusive, particularly for those most vulnerable
and at risk?
The forum, sponsored by SFSU’s Lab for Community and Media, is being conducted in the spirit
of exploration and fact-finding. Insights and highlights will be distilled into a report to be
published afterwards. These findings will shape our future work.
The forum is organized by Journalism Professor Jon Funabiki with colleagues Associate
Professor Venise Wagner and Assistant Professor Laura Moorhead. The moderator will be
Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s Vice President for Diversity in News & Operation and
former Dean of Faculty of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The Silicon Valley
Community Foundation has provided a grant to support this exploration.
The event will be held from 10 am to 3 pm on Friday, February 12 in The Towers on the San
Francisco State University campus.
List of Roundtable Participants
(Final)
Rose Aguilar, Your Call Host, KALW Public Radio
Kwan Booth, Engagement Editor, Making Contact; Tech & Culture Writer, Guardian U.S.
Eric Eldon, Editor in Chief, Hoodline
Kristen Go, Managing Editor-Digital, San Francisco Chronicle
Marty Gonzalez, Professor of Broadcast Communications, San Francisco State University
Allie Herson, Communications Specialist, San Mateo County Health Department
Arturo Hilario, Managing Editor, El Observador
Melissa Hung, Director, Writers Corps
Raj Jayadev, Founder and Director, Silicon Valley DeBug
Holly Kernan, Executive News Editor, KQED
Sonny Le, Communications Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau Consultant
Geoff Link, Editor & Publisher, Central City Extra!
Hilbert Morales, Founder and Publisher Emeritus, El Observador
Mary Ratcliff, Editor, San Francisco Bay View
Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director, Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting
Michael Stoll, Executive Director, San Francisco Public Press
Alexis Terrazas, Editor in Chief, El Tecolote
La Toya Tooles, CORE Journalism Instructor, Youth Radio
Project Team
Professor Jon Funabiki
Jon Funabiki, whose career spans journalism, philanthropy and
academia, is a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University.
He joined the university after an 11-year career with the Ford
Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropies. As the deputy
director of the Media, Arts and Culture Unit in New York, he led grant
programs to promote ethics, credibility and diversity in journalism;
social justice journalism; and the ethnic and independent news media.
Jon is the former founding director of San Francisco State University’s
Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism and a former
journalist with The San Diego Union, where he specialized in U.S.-Asia
political and economic affairs. A graduate of San Francisco State University, Jon was awarded
the John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University; the Jefferson
Fellowship at the East-West Center of Honolulu; and a National Endowment for the Humanities
Professional Summer Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Associate Prof. Venise Wagner
A former reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle and Hearst-owned
San Francisco Examiner specialized in coverage of the Bay Area’s
African American communities, economic development, culture and
education. She is author of the memoir, “Love in the Time of Pinochet”
and is working on the book, “Tracking Opportunity: Methods and tools
for reporting on racial and ethnic communities,” which offers tools and
reporting strategies to better cover structural inequities that lead to
racial disparities.
Assistant Prof. Laura Moorhead
With a background in magazine editing, education, public policy
research and technology, Laura Moorhead joins SF State as a newly
minted Ph.D. She earned her doctorate in learning sciences and
technology design from Stanford University.
Laura’s research interests include open systems and the “opening of
science,” media technology, digital archives, cultural change through
technology, mass media and education. She works to improve
educational practice in primary sources and technology and to help people find new ways of
combining critical literacy and open access. Laura was an editor and executive producer during
an 11-year tenure at Wired Magazine. She has also served as a contributing editor and writer
for PBSFrontline/World and IDEO. She earned her Master’s degree in liberal arts from Stanford
and her Bachelor of Science from Ball State University.
Keith Woods
Vice President, Diversity in News and Operations, National Public
Radio
Keith Woods leads the development of NPR's vision and strategy for
diversity as a member of the Executive Leadership Team. His focus: to
help NPR and member stations strengthen the breadth and depth of
diversity in content, staff, audience and the work environment. He
serves as a resource to work teams and individuals at NPR and stations
who share these goals. Keith joined NPR in February 2010 after 15 years
at the Poynter Institute, the nation's leading training center for
professional journalists. He spent his last five years at Poynter as its dean of faculty. He has
taught writing and reporting on race relations, ethics and diversity, and was previously the
Institute’s director of diversity. He regularly writes and speaks on race and media and is the coauthor of “The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity,” published by
Columbia University Press in 2006.