I never set out to be a journalist. Before I started the Hayward Herald in 2023, I was trying to be a better-informed voter. In the run up to the 2022 election, I realized there were all these candidates who I knew almost nothing about. Candidates for school board, city council and county supervisor were names I had never even heard of.
Like a lot of people, I knew more about representatives for Florida and Wisconsin than the people representing me at the local level.
I set out to change that. I knew that the people who have the most impact on your life are the ones closest to home—city council and school board directly impact my life every day. But I had no idea who the people were or what the bodies had done recently, let alone what individual people had voted on. As a librarian, I knew that all government meetings are public and how to find and read agendas, minutes and reports.
I dove in.
I downloaded and read documents and presentations, took notes on minutes and meetings, then created brief write-ups to share with my friends and family. But after a while I realized that if I was writing up these reports, I may as well put them someplace everyone can see. Someone else would probably find it useful to know what’s going on.
And everything has kind of happened from there. I’m mostly interested in politics, policy and infrastructure, but community and culture building has always been in the back of my mind. Local news can be a catalyst for building a real Hayward culture—a shared reality in our fractured, post-modern lives.
And I want to bring that ethos to Tri-City Voice. My focus will always be Hayward, but hopefully it’ll be interesting to people in the Tri-Cities, too. Building a local media landscape is a lot of work, but I’ve learned that partnerships are non-optional. I’ll be contributing to Tri-City Voice for as long as they’ll have me, and hopefully we can rebuild local media as a community.
Clearly nobody is going to do it for us.
