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The daily production and publishing of BenitoLink is accomplished by four of us working full-time, several paid and committed freelance reporters and photographers, a cheery bookkeeper and four to five paid interns year-round.
Here’s the reporting team: Noe Magaña, Monserrat Solis, Carmel de Bertaut, Robert Eliason, Jenny Mendolla Arbizu, Jenna Mayzouni, and Leslie David. Our current Intern Reporters are Vivian Guadalupe Sierra, Alexis Juarez and Jenna Ellis.
We’re a small organization trying to report on the whole county.
Our commitment to covering local government means attending or reviewing meetings held by: San Benito County Supervisors, Hollister City Council, San Juan Bautista City Council, county planning and city planning, LAFCO, COG, Mobility Partnership, Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital, Hollister School District, Hollister High School and Aromas-San Juan District…to name a few. And those are just meetings tied to public funding.
Thanks to county resident and local business support, San Benito’s BenitoLink contrasts with the national trend of expanding news deserts. That is why George Stanley of Northwestern Medill wrote an article about and included BenitoLink in a recent report about “Bright Spots in the Local News Landscape”.
Our good fortune contrasts with a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Some Newspapers Don’t Have a Single Reporter” by Alexandria Bruell, made me feel thankful for the amazing support we get. The article quoted a reporter Chuck Stinnett, who worked for a Gannett paper until he accepted their buy-out and became a freelance feature reporter.
“We were always there, always watching, always reporting,” said Stinnett. “The presence of somebody scribbling notes in the corner-as it is, I’m sure, in every town- helped keep city fathers on the straight-and-narrow,” Stinnett said.
“The presence of somebody scribbling notes in the corner-as it is, I’m sure, in every town- helped keep city fathers on the straight-and-narrow.”
It is hard to describe the overall community value of this kind of reporting. Real people, walking our streets, talking in person…not distant reporters or articles fabricated through AI.
The WSJ article pointed out the misleading status of a newspaper that says it covers an area but doesn’t have any reporters actually living there. A Northwestern University study showed that “about half of the 70 smallest papers owned by Gannett and Lee Enterprises- two of the nation’s largest local-news publishers—had no listing of any local journalists on staff.”
Knowing who the reporters are in your community is the only protection you have from this ‘hands-off” approach and now AI to journalism.
A lot of people don’t know this but major media uses local media like BenitoLink to find stories of interest. BenitoLink is a news source for larger newsrooms looking for an easy story.
Bruell wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ‘The decline of local news is having an outsize impact on the entire media industry because the study said that until recently, as much as 85% of the news that ultimately made national headlines was first published in a local newspaper.”
“…as much as 85% of the news that ultimately made national headlines was first published in a local newspaper.”
San Benito county has the answer. It has a strong and expanding newsroom because the community values local, dependable news and information. All we have to do is stand behind it and keep local reporters “in the field”, blowing away rumors and confirming the facts.
On Dec. 29, BenitoLink was just under $47,000 but still working toward the community-funded and INN offered match of $66,500. If you haven’t yet, please support BenitoLink, San Benito’s nonprofit news organization.
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