Three standout stories uncovered by the California Local News Fellowship

The plight of local journalism was made especially evident this July. As the month kicked off, California’s new budget took effect, allocating $15 million to extend the  fellowship program administered by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism — enabling dozens of two-year reporting and editing positions in newsrooms across the state.

Just weeks later, Congress and the White House slashed federal funding to PBS and NPR stations. The $1.1 billion shortfall in public media’s budgets will particularly impact rural, already-underserved communities. The television station KEET in Eureka, for example, will lose nearly half of its funding.

While the California program can’t backfill such drastic federal cuts, program leaders said the Golden State’s investment in the expansion of the California Local News Fellowship will ensure some critical stories can be told. Since 2023, the program has placed more than 70 full-time reporters with a variety of outlets throughout the state, from the Vietnamese-language Nguoi Viêt in Santa Ana to North State Public Radio in Chico to the water-focused publication SJV Water in the Central Valley. Another 38 fellows will begin this fall as the first group cycles off. 

The new infusion of money — championed by State Senator Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, and Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park — will pay the salaries and benefits for a fourth cohort of reporting fellows, who will be paired with publications across the state for two-year stints beginning in 2026, as well as for new editing positions. State funds will also support ongoing training for reporters and newsrooms from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and ethnic media partners.

As tech behemoths like Google and Facebook have increasingly dominated the targeted advertising market that publications had relied on, the state has lost nearly two-thirds of its journalists over the past 20 years, according to a 2023 report from Northwestern University. That left an information gap for the public. 

“Our democracy and the cohesion of our communities depend on fact-based reporting. The state’s historic commitment signals that journalism is a precious public resource,” said Elena Conis, interim dean of UC Berkeley Journalism.

The first cohort of Local News Fellows will conclude their term this August. To mark the occasion and the funding that will allow the program to continue, UC Berkeley News rounded up three of the impactful storylines the fellowship’s journalists have investigated.

Education disparities in the Napa Valley

In her first year at The Press Democrat, Tarini Mehta has covered the education system in Napa County, which enrolls more than 25,000 students at institutions ranging from tiny schools in the grape-covered hills to a local community college. The education landscape of Wine Country is complicated by the wealth disparities its fame as a tourist destination has wrought as well as the need for bilingual education as the area’s Hispanic population grows.

“When you think of Napa, you think of these fancy wineries, and you totally forget about the people who keep this whole region running and whose needs are so often unmet,” Mehta said. 

Her reporting has included a data-rich look at how economic segregation as well as Napa’s open-enrollment policies — meaning students can transfer wherever they wish — have resulted in a growing divide between its two public high schools, Napa and Vintage. The latter has received increasingly more resources from tax dollars and parent booster clubs as well as more sterling academic and extracurricular outcomes, like football victories and a choir performance in Carnegie Hall. The former, by contrast, has seen falling test scores and serves a lower-income student population. 

Mehta has also covered how culture war controversies have made their way to pockets of Northern California. Recently, she broke news that the Howell Mountain School District, not far from the wineries of St. Helena, will soon be voting on whether parents have to definitively opt-in to lessons that might touch on the LGBTQ+ experience. That story is the kind of under-the-radar news item that a journalist from a national outlet might never have dug up; Mehta learned of it because, in the slow summer season for education, she drove up the windy mountain roads to attend the meeting of the school board, which doesn’t publish its minutes online. 

“It’s only through this program and the stability that it offers that I was able to cover a story like that,” she said.

Mehta reported in her home country of India before earning her master’s degree from Berkeley’s journalism school, where she participated in the Investigative Reporting Program. She said her training there has influenced the way she does her job now. 

“Every single story I do now, I do from an accountability angle,” she said. “It’s just completely changed the way I think.”

A fatal diagnosis for Latino stoneworkers

Semantha Raquel Norris, another Berkeley School of Journalism graduate, grew up crisscrossing Los Angeles to visit family scattered across the area. 

“I’m half Salvadoran, half white, so I grew up traversing not only geographical but also socioeconomic and ethnic and racial divisions that exist within the city,” she said.

That experience informs her reporting and photography for the San Fernando Sun/El Sol, a 121-year-old bilingual newspaper that covers the San Fernando Valley, a region that houses around 40% of LA’s population but is “very overlooked,” Norris said. In particular, she focuses on the northeast San Fernando Valley, which is predominantly Latino and low-income.

Despite the team’s size — Norris has only two colleagues — reporters’ close ties with the community have allowed them to break major stories, such as when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in a Lowe’s parking lot ended with not just the arrest of a local journalist— which other outlets covered — but also a local tamale vendor having a heart attack. Norris’ article ran more than two weeks before the story was picked up by the Los Angeles Times.

“We were the only ones with local connections to actually report on that,” Norris said. “When we don’t have people on the ground within these communities …  it does become harder to tell the stories of the people who are being affected and to follow them and to put pressure on government and on elected officials.”

Norris also did a series on silicosis, an often-fatal lung condition with a high prevalence among the many stone fabrication workers in the area. Engineered stone contains a higher proportion of silica, which is released into the air as microscopic particles when workers cut it.

Those silica particles can scar the lungs — even when workers take protective measures. That means patients in the later stages of the disease require oxygen or even a risky and expensive double-lung transplant. In a study of a cohort of California fabrication workers with silicosis, one in five had died from the disease. Their median age of death was just 46 years old.

It took time, Norris said, to find affected individuals who were willing to talk, particularly due to concerns over immigration status. She ultimately spoke to both advocates and patients, including a 42-year-old man who, after 22 years working with engineered stone, was coughing up blood and struggling to climb stairs as a result of advanced silicosis. 

To endanger, or not to endanger?

KPBS reporter Kori Suzuki drove more than two hours to record a radio and television segment that captures how conservation measures — in this case, whether or not to declare the burrowing owl as threatened or endangered — can be complicated. 

Since his fellowship started in 2023, Suzuki has covered the South Bay and Imperial Valley areas southeast of San Diego. An 85% Latino area that provides the nation with a vast amount of produce each winter, the Imperial Valley “gets a fraction of the coverage San Diego does,” Suzuki said.

Suzuki grew up in Richmond and holds a master’s degree from Berkeley in journalism; it was while interning in the Bay Area as an undergrad that he first spoke with the wildlife expert who eventually tipped him off that the tiny birds’ population was dwindling. At KPBS, he revisited the idea and learned that 8,000 burrowing owls — representing the majority of the state’s population — live in the Imperial Valley, and that authorities are considering whether to designate them as a threatened species. But prioritizing the owls, Suzuki learned, has tradeoffs in terms of water conservation and renewable energy generation, making the potential move controversial.

To make the plight of the burrowing owl more engaging than the technical language used in the state wildlife commission’s meeting minutes, Suzuki needed an interviewee. He found one through the kind of happenstance that comes from being embedded in a community: A public defender in an amateur photography Facebook group he belonged to kept posting daily images of burrowing owls. Eventually, she accompanied Suzuki to the desert south of Joshua Tree National Park, pointing out the birds.

Because of the federal cuts, KPBS will be short $4.3 million, or 12% of their budget, come October. Suzuki said the loss of funding “underscores what an incredible opportunity it’s been to know that for two years, I have a job, I have a salary [and] I have healthcare.”