Lydia Chávez has been a Mission resident since 1998. Her earlier career was at The New York Times on the business, foreign, and city desks. Local has long been in her bones – her Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on NYC’s experiment in community boards. Now, she’s searching for a sustainable news model. She was a professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism until the spring of 2019.

Molly Oleson is a Bay Area-based multimedia journalist, editor, photographer and illustrator. She holds a B.F.A. in painting from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, and a master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Oleson has contributed to dozens of publications, and most recently, served as Editor of the Pacific Sun, the country’s longest continuously published alternative weekly newspaper. She aims to find creative ways of combining writing, illustration, photography and video to tell compelling stories.