Listen "How Mission Local spun off from UC Berkeley and became a self-sustaining news outlet"
Episode Synopsis
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ 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.
More episodes of the podcast The Business of Content with Simon Owens
Why this business news outlet ditched advertising to focus entirely on paid subscriptions
19/11/2025
This local newsletter covering a Dallas suburb has the highest paid conversion rate on Substack
06/10/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.