Extra! Extra! A Fresh Local News Outlet Arrives With a Howl

Last summer, The New York Times wrote a surprised piece about the glut of San Francisco news organizations — 27 outlets for a population of 800,000 — at a time when local news is a struggling (some would say dying) business. But among the outlets profiled and lauded for their alternative models, including Gazetteer, the SF Standard and Mission Local, not a single one was a worker-owned cooperative.

In retrospect, this is odd, given the Bay Area’s history of collectively owned bakeries, bike shops and bookstores. We once even had a worker-owned strip club (RIP Lusty Lady).

Enter Coyote Media Collective, an upstart news organization in the spirit of the city’s bygone alt weeklies, founded by a team of talented Bay Area journalists intent on “informing the public, and having fun at the same time.”

The 11 founding members — an all-star line-up — will be familiar names to many Bay Area news consumers: Amir Aziz, Nuala Bishari, Alan Chazaro, Reo Eveleth, Estefany Gonzalez, Rahawa Haile, Soleil Ho, Daniel Lavery, Cecilia Lei, Emma Silvers and Supriya Yelimeli. Together, the group has worked for nearly every Bay Area news publication, past and present, including this one.

Their origin story is one of both dissatisfaction and idealism. “I think that almost every disgruntled journalist at one point or another says, ‘Maybe we should launch our own thing,’” says Bishari, who left her position as an opinion columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle in April to focus on launching Coyote.

“It felt like a pipe dream,” she says. “Everybody talks about it, but who actually does it? But once you have Soleil working on something, they are just so dogged in moving things forward.” Over the next few months, they assembled what Bishari describes as a “dream team,” pulling together editors; photographers; audio and video journalists; and an experienced slate of arts and culture, politics, health and homelessness reporters.

The collective announced their plans publicly on June 16; two days later they had already raised over 75% of their $80,000 launch goal. Each founding member will have equal ownership and, eventually, equal pay. Content on the site will be free, but membership tiers will allow increased access to the journalists’ work.

Bishari says the public enthusiasm has been validating. “Seeing the response from the community and people who are donating money towards this has just been incredible,” she says. “It’s really affirming that this is exactly the type of model and product that people are really desperate for in the Bay Area.”

Nationally, the worker-owned newsroom model is encouraging. Bishari points to sites like Defector, Hell Gate and the intersectional feminist news site The Flytrap. These new publications have emerged at a moment when public media is threatened by government funding clawbacks, nonprofit newsrooms are struggling to tap donors, single-funder operations are subject to the whims of their benefactors, and corporate leadership replaces journalists with AI-generated nonsense. A lean, member-supported operation starts to look downright stable.

Coyote plans to go live later this summer, featuring the kind of longform narratives we once saw in alt weekly cover stories. Harking back to the golden age of Craigslist’s Missed Connections, the site will also include a “Meet Cute Market” for those tired of endless swipes on dating apps. The publication will prioritize investigative reporting, arts and culture coverage well beyond the largest Bay Area orgs, and “pointed” opinion columns. Coyote’s tagline is “independent journalism with a BITE!”

About that name: it’s a homage to the trickster of Native American culture, but also a nod to Margo St. James’ COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), a sex-worker’s rights organization that threw the annual Hooker’s Ball in San Francisco and published the newspaper COYOTE HOWLS. The new collective’s logo, designed by Ace Ty, has some of the lascivious energy of Tex Avery’s wolf, with plenty of side-eye to boot.

As their pipe dream becomes a reality, Bishari and the Coyote team are excited to pursue the stories that may not have made it past the pitch stage or their former editors’ desks. They know that Bay Area readers are hungry for this type of deeper-dive reporting too.

“I’ve seen the way that an obsession with breaking news and with clicks really drives the mission of a newsroom. And both of those things suck up a lot of resources,” Bishari says. “While everyone else is chasing breaking news, we can be lifting up the hood and trying to understand the stories behind those headlines.”