The Weekly is proud to join the California Local News Fellowship, among 37 newsrooms statewide.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about dueling problems: The need for more journalists and journalism, at a time when the journalism industry is in crisis. It’s hard to break into any field, but there’s no shortage of young people who want to work as journalists—there’s plenty of motivation out there to join the Fourth Estate and hold power to account. But there are too few news outlets thriving, much less hiring. Instead, more and more are closing up shop. 

Enter the California Local News Fellowship, an initiative approved as part of the state budget in 2022, that aspires to help address both of these problems: the ailing state of the industry and the pipeline for new journalists. 

The fellowship, run out of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, accepts applications from newsrooms seeking a fellow to help bolster a particular coverage area. Then they accept applications from early-career journalists for a two-year fellowship—paid for mostly by the state, with newsrooms chipping in—and match fellows to newsrooms. The fellows get real-life training and experience. Newsrooms get boots on the ground from someone eager to find and tell stories and develop their reporting and storytelling skills. In short, a win-win. 

The fellowship today announced the cohort for 2024-26, and the Weekly is thrilled to be participating, and to host Katie Rodriguez beginning in September. She is a 2023 graduate of the journalism school at UC Berkeley, after making a career change from marine science. (Once she joins our team, she’ll introduce herself here in this newsletter.)

I’m excited for the Weekly, but also for the program and its impact overall. For now, this is the second of three cohorts (I hope there are more in the future), placing journalists in 35 California counties, more eyes and ears finding and telling local stories. 

“With a national crisis in local journalism upon us, every single one of these fellows and newsrooms is a sign of hope,” Christa Scharfenberg, fellowship program director, said in a statement. “We’re honored to support the next generation of journalists and help invigorate a national movement for robust local news.”

As for my journalism career, I started out writing for an underground publication during a high school summer program (as students in an environmental education program, we called it The Litter). Then I went on to write and edit for a monthly magazine in college, and that enabled me to two internships that helped me advance. How did you get started in your career path?

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