CALIFORNIA-BASED
reporter + researcher
ABOUT
I’m a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to The Imprint and KFF Health News. I often write about the intersection of government and business and about welfare and legal systems in the U.S.
Previously, I worked as a staff reporter at the East Bay Times and The Mercury News (the daily newspapers under the Bay Area News Group), where I covered government, criminal justice, schools, business, health care, and many statewide breaking news events.
I covered some of California's biggest natural disasters in recent years and was a lead reporter in the field on much of the Bay Area News Group’s wildfire coverage across the state. My reporting on the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California, was part of a team reporting package that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news.
JOURNALISM EDUCATION
I am a journalism professor at Contra Costa College, a community college on the border of San Pablo and Richmond, California. There, I advise the student newspaper, The Advocate, and teach courses in reporting, newswriting and media studies. If you are interested in our program, visit the college’s journalism division webpage.
PACIFIC MEDIA WORKERS GUILD
I am currently serving as the president of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, a local of the NewsGuild. Our guild represents more than 1,000 newspaper journalism and communications workers across Northern California, the Central Valley and Hawaii, along with freelance and new media journalists across the country. We represent the nonpartisan perspective of working journalists and newsroom staffers at some of the nation’s most respected mastheads, and we were the first local of the NewsGuild to create a unit for freelance media workers, called Guild Freelancers. Learn more about our work at mediaworkers.org