|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The California Local News Fellowship on Thursday announced the pairing of 38 journalists with newsrooms around the state, and for the first time ever, Embarcadero Media Foundation is among the hosts.
Beginning in September, Stanford journalism graduate Hannah Bensen will join Embarcadero’s Peninsula publications. Bensen is a former Embarcadero intern, having written about such disparate topics as land management and Stanford University’s decision to back Harvard in its ongoing funding battle with the Trump administration.
Bensen will be the news organization’s inequity beat reporter. The beat is a first for Embarcadero — born of the recognition that great wealth disparities exist along the Peninsula and that those chasms create societal and economic issues worth exploring. She will report on issues such as the high cost of housing, factors influencing employment, changing educational models and more. She begins the job on Sept. 8, 2025 and will be with Embarcadero through the summer of 2027.
Bensen is uniquely qualified for the position. She has a bachelor’s degree in international politics and economics from Middlebury College in Vermont in addition to her master’s degree in journalism from Stanford. She has worked on policy and research related to international banks, climate and monetary policy issues at the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, D.C. And this summer, she is back in the nation’s capital where she is a data reporting intern at the Washington Post.
The new position augments the nonprofit foundation’s existing roster of journalists and is largely funded by the state of California through an initial $25 million grant to the University of California, Berkeley. Just this month, the program announced that it had secured an additional $15 million in funding to continue through 2028. Bensen will be part of the program’s third cohort.
The Fellowship is a response to a growing crisis in the local news landscape. A study from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found that one in four news publications ceased operations between 2004 and 2019. Residents of many counties in California now have no or very little coverage of local news.
