I couldn’t help responding to the article https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/oil-company-bay-area-city-news-change-19566016.php about Richmond news and Richmondside. While I welcome Richmondside enthusiastically, it is hardly the first or the only news source to challenge or supplement Richmond Standard, inaccurately characterized as dominating Richmond news.

A little history: Back in the day, we had the Richmond Independent (1954-1978), which had a full-time “city” reporter who occupied an office in the basement of City Hall, the Press Room. The Oakland Tribune (1874-2016) also has a reporter assigned to Richmond. Together, the Independent and the Tribune provided exhaustive coverage of Richmond, including blow-by-blow accounts of City Council and Planning Commission meetings.

In 1976, Dean Lesher, publisher of the Contra Costa Times, went head-to-head with the Richmond Independent, delivering comparable news delivered free of charge to Richmond residents. In two years, it drove the Richmond Independent out of business. Eventually, Lesher’s company and its successors, currently the Bay Area News Group, bought the Oakland Tribune and other papers, combining them into the East Bay Times, which is mostly void of any Richmond news.

Because of the growing dearth of Richmond news, I started the TOM BUTT E-FORUM in 2000 to fill a gap in Richmond news, particularly political news. The archives include thousands of posts and are accessible at http://tombutt.com/e-forum/e-forum.htm and http://tombutt.com/archives.htm. Although I reduced the intensity of the TOM BUTT E-FORUM after I termed out as mayor, it still goes on and provides a depth of political commentary and investigative reporting not covered by any other outlet. It probably is best record of Richmond politics over the last 24 years.

In the 2000’s, there was periodic Richmond coverage by the East Bay Express, and the Berkeley Daily Planet, but that long ago dried up. Richmond Confidentialpicked up some of the slack in 2009, and the journalism students have published some Pulitzer Prize level articles over the years, but issues are limited to align with class schedules, and the content has pretty much gone soft with a progressive flavor in recent years.

The Richmond Standard was launched in 2014 and has done a prolific job of covering Richmond. It continues to attract criticism, not because of its news quality, but because it is funded by Chevron.

Then, there is the Richmond Pulse, started in 2011, as “as an antidote to the city’s bad reputation.” Now the Contra Costa Pulse, it is published in both English and Spanish, and has a clear progressive bent. The Contra Costa Pulse was founded by New America Media and is supported by grants from The California Endowment and the East Contra Costa STRONG Collaborative Fund.

The Grandview Independent debuted in 2024 and has a promising mix of local news.

Radio Free Richmond still posts infrequently and focuses on political issues.

Now, we have Richmondside,  a welcome addition to our City’s news scene, but neither the first nor the only antidote to Chevron’s Richmond Standard.

For a decade, an oil company dominated this Bay Area city's news. Now, that's set to change.

'It's a cool reversal of a lot of years of news organizations pulling out of towns in the Bay Area'

By Timothy Karoff,Culture ReporterUpdated July 13, 2024 3:06 p.m.

FILE: An aerial view of Richmond, Calif., which just got a new independent news source.
JasonDoiy/Getty Images

For a decade, Richmond’s leading news source has been run by an oil company. Now, that’s set to change.

Richmondside, a hyperlocal, independent news site dedicated to covering the largely working-class city, launched in June. It’s the third news site to be established by Cityside, the nonprofit newsgroup that runs Berkeleyside and the Oaklandside. In just two weeks, the site has already won over 100 members. 

“As a journalist and a resident of the town, it’s a cool reversal of a lot of years of news organizations pulling out of towns in the Bay Area,” editor-in-chief Kari Hulac told SFGATE.

In a KQED interview, Tasneem Raja, Cityside’s chief strategy officer and editor-in-chief of the Oaklandside, said the news group scouted all over the East Bay for cities to expand into before landing on Richmond. Two of the guiding questions, she said, were: “Where can we sustain the journalism that we’re trying to do? Where can we provide something that’s not currently being offered?”

It’s no secret that newsrooms, especially local ones, are in crisis. In 2023, the US lost more than two local newsrooms every week; more than half of all US counties have, at best, very limited access to local news. This issue is especially pronounced in Richmond. Although the city has several small-scale news sources, like Grandview Independent and Richmond Confidential, its news ecosystem has been largely dominated by an oil company since 2014. 

Chevron, which owns and operates the refinery that is Richmond’s largest employer, funds a community information site called the Richmond Standard. As NPR and Floodlight reported in March, the Standard, which launched a decade ago, is generally recognized as the city’s main news source, even as it paints a distorted picture of Chevron’s relationship to the city. Part of the Standard’s self-declared mission, displayed on the footer of its website’s home page, is “to provide a voice for Chevron Products Company on civic issues.” According to NPR and Floodlight, the Richmond Standard routinely underreports oil spills, as well as the refinery’s flares, which researchers have shown cause significant health risks.

Chevron is only one facet of life in Richmond, and news about the refinery makes up a small portion of Richmondside’s coverage. The majority of the site’s news is trained on the particulars of civic and cultural life; Hulac emphasized that Richmond’s complexity is what makes it an especially important place to cover.

“As a journalist, it’s really just a special place to be serving,” she said. “For the good and the bad — for the beauty and the challenges.”

Even by Bay Area standards, the city is ethnically diverse: nearly half of the city’s population is Hispanic or Latino, and Richmond is a hub for the East Bay’s Tibetan community. It has a history of chemical dumping, but it’s also host to several stretches of regional shoreline. According to Hulac and others, its culinary scene is exceptional. 

Hulac said that while Richmondside’s staff is too small to have a beat reporter dedicated to covering Chevron, the site will report on the company’s effects on daily life in the city. “The way that you cover the refinery is, you always have to ask yourself, how does this impact Richmonders?” she said. 

Among the outlet’s coverage of restaurant closures and the city’s open studios, Richmondside’s lone full-time staff reporter recently wrote about a proposed refinery tax. With the support of a grant from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Richmondside plans to publish a series of stories on the city’s air quality. (Approximately a quarter of Richmond residents have asthma — nearly twice the rate of the rest of California. Although the refinery is among the city’s largest polluters, it is not the only significant polluter; coal trains, for instance, also cause significant pollution in the area.)

Currently, Richmondside has four staffers: Hulac, staff reporter Joel Umanzor and two summer fellows from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Still, Cityside’s institutional backing makes the publication unique in the city’s news landscape. The site has a budget for freelancers, whose stories regularly appear in its pages, as well as the support of the group’s audience engagement editor to push its stories over social media.

In preparation for Richmondside’s launch, Cityside asked hundreds of Richmond locals on the street what they wanted from a news site. Many mentioned coverage of crime; others mentioned they wanted to read about education and homelessness. But one theme reappeared again and again. 

“People love living there,” Hulac said. “There’s a lot of pride there. And people want the media to understand that and report on that.” 

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3:06 p.m., July 13, 2024, to correct details about Richmondside’s grant from the Medill School of Journalism, and the relationship between the site’s membership and its ability to hire more staff.