How Mission Local spun off from UC Berkeley and became a self-sustaining news outlet

The Business of Content

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One of the great things about being a college journalism major today is that it’s incredibly easy for professors to build their own news sites and allow students to experience every aspect of the publishing process. Not that long ago, journalism students had few avenues for publication outside their college newspaper.

Lydia Chavez took advantage of this dynamic while teaching at UC Berkeley. In 2008, she and her colleagues launched Mission Local, a local news blog that covered San Francisco’s Mission District. It quickly gained traction within the community, and in 2014 Lydia spun it out into its own independent news organization. Today, it’s fully sustained by a mix of large and small donors.

In our interview, Lydia walked me through how she incorporated the site into her journalism curriculum, why she spun it out from the university, and whether she thinks Mission Local’s model can be replicated across the US.