For years Richmond Metropolis Councilmember Cesar Zepeda has been on an unsuccessful campaign to steer the grocery retailer chains of America — or a minimum of considered one of them — to carry a grocery store again to his industrial metropolis on the sting of the San Francisco Bay.
He’s persistent. He’s known as company headquarters. He’s emailed buyer relations. Often, he’s gotten executives on the cellphone, and listened to them stammer on about why Richmond isn’t the suitable place for them to find a retailer, regardless of its inhabitants of 117,000 within the coronary heart of the Bay Space.
After years of disappointing conversations, Zepeda has concluded one thing fundamental about his metropolis: It’s paying a giant worth by not having the ability to inform its personal story.
Richmond has not had its personal every day newspaper for years. The loss got here throughout a interval of profound struggles for the city, which has handled fluctuating crime, financial issues and environmental challenges. Zepeda and others say there’s quite a lot of good and dangerous occurring in Richmond, however the dearth of native information protection presents a skewed view of town — oversimplified and years old-fashioned — as an impoverished and violent group.
“The dearth of protection places us into deserts of every thing. We now have a hospital desert. We now have a grocery retailer desert,” Zepeda mentioned. “Simply the shortage of any protection, it impacts the notion.”
On this information desert, the principle data supply has been the Richmond Commonplace, a information web site funded by Chevron, Richmond’s largest employer. It presents experiences on youth sports activities, crime logs and issues to do on the town. Latest articles have highlighted a mural mission, a automobile caravan supporting racial justice and upcoming closures to Interstate 80.
However the Commonplace is conspicuously silent with regards to hard-hitting reporting on the Chevron refinery, which activists blame for town’s excessive charges of hospitalization for childhood bronchial asthma. On June 19, the Metropolis Council voted to place a measure on the November poll asking native voters to levy a tax on the refinery that might generate tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} a yr for use as town sees match. The lead-up and follow-up to this vastly consequential improvement have been nowhere on the Commonplace’s homepage.
Richmond is one in a swelling quantity of California communities that in recent times have needed to navigate civic life with no conventional newspaper. The town — a onetime shipbuilding hub that fell on arduous occasions and is now within the midst of a rebound — was as soon as served by a number of papers, however the grim economics took them out one after the other.
All of the whereas, in-depth every day protection of Richmond, a metropolis with 23 distinct neighborhoods and cutthroat politics, with a refinery of important significance to the state’s power financial system, shrank and shrank.
“The dearth of protection places us into deserts of every thing. We now have a hospital desert. We now have a grocery retailer desert.”
— Zepeda Richmond Metropolis Councilmember Cesar Zepeda
Councilmember Cesar Zepeda says the dearth of native information protection in Richmond has resulted in a skewed portrayal of his metropolis, making it tougher to attract retailers.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
The difficulty of California’s rising information deserts — and the fallout on civic engagement — has turn into a heated subject within the state Legislature, the place Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) is pushing a measure, Meeting Invoice 886, that might require main social media platforms and serps to pay information retailers for accessing their articles, both by way of a predetermined payment or by way of an quantity set by arbitration. Publishers must use 70% of these funds to pay journalists in California. Lawmakers are additionally contemplating state Senate Invoice 1327, which might tax massive tech platforms for the info they gather from customers and pump the cash into information organizations by giving them a tax credit score for using full-time journalists.
AB 886 is sponsored by the California Information Publishers Assn., whose members have argued for years that on-line serps and social media platforms are gutting the newspaper enterprise by gobbling up promoting income whereas publishing content material they don’t pay for. (The Los Angeles Occasions is a CNPA member, and its enterprise leaders have publicly supported the measure.)
The laws has drawn staunch opposition from Google and different tech firms, which contend it will upend their enterprise mannequin.
The rise of the search engine is considered one of many elements pushing California newspapers out of enterprise. Richmond’s information decline started effectively earlier than eyeballs and promoting migrated on-line.
However Richmond’s story isn’t just concerning the lack of information. It additionally reveals how a group will get data in a post-newspaper world.
Richmond is now a laboratory for on-line journalism startups, together with the one owned by Chevron, whose huge refinery looms over town and has been the main focus of ongoing considerations over poisonous emissions.
Protesters rally in help of placing a measure on the November poll that might levy a brand new tax on Chevron’s refinery, producing hundreds of thousands of {dollars} yearly for metropolis coffers.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
The area’s impartial on-line publications are generally hard-hitting and admirably hardworking, however they’re restricted in dimension and attain. The scholars at UC Berkeley’s journalism college function Richmond Confidential, a information lab for scholar reporters that’s funded by a grant from the Ford Basis. Since late 2020, the husband-and-wife staff of Linda and Soren Hemmila have put out the Grandview Impartial, whose web site proclaims: “For us, there is no such thing as a story too small.”
There’s additionally a youth-focused website, the Pulse, and a publication that focuses on the realm’s Black group. In late June, the staff behind the well-regarded native information web sites Berkeleyside and Oaklandside launched a sister publication known as Richmondside.
Nonetheless, mentioned Metropolis Councilmember Doria Robinson, “the unlucky greatest supply” for a lot of the day-to-day goings on in recent times has been the Richmond Commonplace.
Councilmember Doria Robinson finds it troubling that Richmond residents get their every day information from a website funded by Chevron, the city’s largest employer and a supply of controversy.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
Robinson is a third-generation Richmond resident who was elected to the council in 2022 and for years earlier than that ran a nonprofit farm in North Richmond. She mentioned she is grateful for the work of all of the reporters laboring on a shoestring to carry information to her metropolis. Nevertheless it doesn’t change the burden and affect of the native paper she remembers from her youth.
And as for the Chevron paper, she mentioned: “It’s simply unlucky to must rely on a mission that’s overtly and proudly funded by our native petroleum [company].”
In 2011, the information group that owned the West County Occasions made an announcement that had turn into all too acquainted to Richmond readers: Extra layoffs and cuts have been coming to the chain that revealed the West County Occasions together with a number of different retailers within the East Bay. There could be much less information out of Richmond.
Former Councilmember Tom Butt, who sends out an e-mail about Richmond that doubles as a casual e-newsletter, lamented the choice and urged residents to complain, writing: “What is going to this imply for Richmond? Undoubtedly, it would imply decreased protection of native information.”
5 years later, in 2016, the ax swung once more, and the West County Occasions was merged, together with quite a lot of different newspapers, into two. One other chunk of the reporting employees was minimize.
“The extent of connection we have been in a position to preserve with individuals in the neighborhood actually evaporated in a major approach,” mentioned Craig Lazzeretti, a journalist who coated the area for 30 years, a lot of it in Richmond. Over time, Richmond misplaced its schooling and public security reporters, he mentioned, and whereas Metropolis Corridor remained a precedence, protection of sports activities and leisure additionally declined.
In its heyday, the protection was rigorous, and “it did play a major position” in civic life, Lazzeretti mentioned. “You had quite a lot of sturdy political personalities in Richmond.”
He admits the native newspapers of that period weren’t good: “We have been masking an ethnically various metropolis, and there wasn’t quite a lot of ethnic range in our newsroom.” However reporters did attempt to replicate what was occurring within the metropolis.
The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge spans San Francisco Bay, connecting Contra Costa and Marin counties.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
Because the twenty first century dawned, the West County Occasions, the lone paper nonetheless masking Richmond vigorously, was dealing with a menacing financial shift: the rise of the web. Promoting {dollars} — lengthy the monetary mainstay of conventional newspapers — moved on-line, budgets dwindled, and shortly there have been nearly no reporters left to cowl Richmond every day.
In the meantime, life in Richmond was getting into a darkish interval. The town’s better-paying manufacturing and industrial jobs have been evaporating due to financial shifts, spawning an exodus of middle-class earners to the suburbs.
Chevron, which had lengthy been one of many largest influences on native politics, stayed. However as considerations mounted concerning the results of its refinery on air high quality, progressive candidates started organizing to counter the burden of the oil firm.
The Richmond Commonplace, funded by Chevron, has been conspicuously silent with regards to hard-hitting reporting on the corporate’s refinery.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
By 2010, candidates backed by the Richmond Progressive Alliance had pressed the corporate to contribute extra charges to town to compensate for environmental harm. After which got here the catastrophe of August 2012, when a corroded pipe on the refinery sprung a leak, igniting a sequence of fiery explosions that shrouded the East Bay in choking black smoke. Greater than 100,000 individuals have been ordered to shelter in place, with home windows and doorways sealed shut, and hundreds sought medical therapy after inhaling poisonous air.
The episode set off a wave of activism that included investigations into Chevron’s working practices. In August 2013, Chevron agreed to plead no contest to felony expenses stemming from the hearth and pay $2 million in fines.
5 months later, on Jan. 23, 2014, Chevron launched the Commonplace.
“We expect it’s good for us to have a dialog with Richmond on vital points, and we additionally suppose there are quite a lot of good tales on this metropolis that don’t get instructed daily,” the corporate wrote to readers in asserting the information website.
Progressives have been alarmed: The entity that of their eyes most wanted watchdogging was now a number one supply of native protection.
Tina Szpicek rallies in help of a November poll measure that might levy a brand new tax on Richmond’s Chevron refinery.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
Nonetheless there was now a reporter roaming the neighborhoods, reporting on a brand new baseball subject, a housebreaking, native companies and even some native politics.
In June, whereas the Commonplace ignored the Metropolis Council’s vote on taxing the refinery, it did cowl a Little League triumph, a capturing that left two individuals useless and the schedule of films to be screened this summer time at “Motion pictures within the Park.”
Ross Allen, a spokesperson for Chevron, mentioned the group didn’t want the Commonplace to cowl the council’s vote — it was a sufficiently big occasion that it obtained ample protection in mainstream California publications.
He added, nevertheless, that Chevron opposes the proposed tax, and that “we could have protection on the explanation why that may be a horrible thought for Richmond within the Commonplace. We’ll have it in all places.”
The Occasions interviewed Richmond residents in June to gauge whether or not the lengthy absence of an area newspaper mattered of their lives. Many mentioned they have been unaware of Richmond’s information media historical past, however in interview after interview burdened their starvation for information about their metropolis.
Juan Alfredo, 27, not too long ago moved to Richmond from Guatemala after a stopover in Los Angeles. He paused to speak whereas strolling his little white poodle within the metropolis’s Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline Park. Throughout the glowing waters of the bay, the San Francisco skyline and misty inexperienced hills of Marin County rose within the distance.
Richmond is considered one of many smaller working-class cities that noticed its native newspapers buckle as print promoting income and paid circulation dropped.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
Alfredo mentioned that he loves Richmond’s bodily magnificence, however that his new residence struggles with some quality-of-life points, together with trash and messed-up streets. And he has no thought the place to show for details about what’s going on within the metropolis.
A couple of miles away, Elaina Jones, who moved from close by Orinda final yr, mentioned she enjoys the group within the Marina Bay neighborhood. However she mentioned she has little sense of what’s taking place in the remainder of town. What she does know, she learns not from native media however from speaking to her older neighbors.
Nonetheless, she plans to vote within the native elections in November — and mentioned to take action she wants to determine what’s occurring.
One among her would-be representatives, Metropolis Council candidate Sue Wilson, mentioned the shortage of an area newspaper means candidates usually work to achieve voters one-on-one, by going to their doorways.
Plenty of residents are at the hours of darkness about who’s working for workplace and their positions on points. Which may be one cause, some officers mentioned, that voter turnout in native elections is abysmal.
Wilson mentioned Richmond’s tumultuous politics usually make her suppose, “This looks as if the form of factor that might be within the newspaper.”
She paused. “However then there is no such thing as a newspaper.”
The journalists at Richmondside hope to do their half to alter that. On June 25, the location went dwell with what they hope will probably be dynamic protection.
Richmondside is the newest offshoot of the Cityside Journalism Initiative, a nonprofit on-line information platform launched by journalists seeking to reinvigorate native information protection within the Bay Space. The hassle is funded by way of grants and reader donations.
Surveys finished by Richmondside, a brand new on-line information enterprise, discovered residents need “the remainder of the world to know there are numerous constructive tales” of their metropolis.
(Josh Edelson / For The Occasions)
Richmondside’s new editor, Kari Hulac, mentioned the publication would have two full-time staffers and two interns, in addition to editorial help from throughout the group and contributions from freelancers. She mentioned readers can look ahead to air high quality protection, in addition to tales on neighborhood points, small companies and public security.
For Hulac, a veteran Bay Space journalist, the launch represents a welcome second probability to be concerned in native information.
“I’ve locked the door on a newsroom,” she recalled of shutting a information bureau in Tracy. “I put the handwritten word on the door: ‘This workplace is closed completely.’”
“If you happen to had instructed me, I don’t know, a yr in the past, that I might be again within the Bay Space working in an area newsroom once more, I by no means in one million years would have believed it,” she mentioned.
