KQED Transit Editor Hits the Road: Dan Brekke Retires After 50 Years in Journalism

If KQED reporter and editor Dan Brekke ever put less than 100% into writing a news article, radio spot or Post-it note, nobody’s caught him at it yet. He’s the only person I know who speaks the king’s English in text messages, fully punctuated and fact-checked. As for the abbreviation of state names … he’s against it. “There’s a poetry lost,” he explains.

Imprecise language, received wisdom and lack of poetry. These are a few of Brekke’s least favorite things.

He has plied his trade at KQED for some 18 years, just a fraction of the 50 he has spent in the news business. But not much longer. Come Halloween, Dan Brekke, 71, is retiring, and Bay Area news junkies are going to lose the labor of one of the most persistent polymaths who ever turned a phrase. Or, for that matter, edited one.

The one time I questioned Brekke’s professional judgment was when he insisted that his stepping down didn’t merit this kind of treatment.

We beg to differ. Guy like this hanging up his AP Stylebook? Attention must be paid.

Brekke is officially in charge of the transportation beat, but as an editor and all-around news savant, he’s in high demand for all kinds of stuff among KQED News reporters and editors.

“I won’t be able to tell you all of the different ways he’s had an effect on our newsroom,” says KQED News Managing Editor Ted Goldberg, who describes Brekke as a mentor. “There’s a lot of really strong people who’ve come to KQED since I’ve been here, and no one has improved our news organization as much as Dan. I’ve turned to him for editorial advice more than any other human being on the face of the Earth.”

Erin Baldassari, KQED’s senior housing editor, drew the assignment last year of covering KQED’s layoffs, with Brekke editing.

“It was a relief to have Dan there and reassuring to know he had my back,” she says. “But he was also there to make sure the story was unimpeachable, and an honest reflection of what was happening.” 

This is not just retirement happy talk. Brekke’s like the point guard who doesn’t put up flashy numbers but is on the floor whenever the team is winning. In 2014, for instance, it was Brekke who took it upon himself to get up in the middle of the night and live-blog the Napa earthquake.

His erudition and recall are legendary. An hour after I asked him my first interview question, he interrupted himself: “Is that too much detail?”

Geography, history, wildfire, weather, baseball, PG&E, salmon, infrastructure — these are some of the subjects covered in the hundreds of KQED News stories with his byline on them. His editing hand is all over hundreds more.

But if you ask me, the Rosetta Stone to his journalism approach can be found in an obscure post he wrote in 2018. Here, he debunks an article’s claim that the 1906 Trip Down Market Street trolley footage illustrates a safer transit environment because of the limited number of automobiles. Brekke does this by digging up old data to figure out that the rate of vehicle-related deaths back then was actually far greater than in 2018.

Classic maniacal Brekke. Unable to abide even a tiny dollop of bullshit, he finds just the right hose to wash it away.

One time, when I misstated the year California had entered the union, I thought he might deck me. To Dan, facts are precious things, the building blocks of journalism. So you better come correct, in private conversation or — God help you — in your presentation to the public.

He could be, shall we say, forthright in his critique of your work. But why blame the messenger? His sole concern was the public.

Born and raised outside Chicago, Brekke landed his first journalism job at the age of 18, working as a copy boy for the Chicago Today newspaper. Eventually, he wound up at the San Francisco Examiner, where he became an editor on the city desk and did a stint running the op-ed page and writing editorials. In the mid-2000s, he landed at KQED as the afternoon news editor.

It’s hard not to see his moving on as the end of an era. Or multiple eras. From a time when news production required typesetting machines and pneumatic tubes, to the present, when reporters can potentially write, publish and distribute an article on their phones. Brekke came up in journalism when an editorial disagreement might be settled during an alcohol-fueled fistfight. Today, it’s matcha lattes and a conversation over Slack.

As we baby boomers exit journalism, taking our loud mouths and hardcover dictionaries with us, news organizations will also lose a wealth of institutional knowledge and craft. But some changes have been unambiguously beneficial. In Brekke’s earlier days, the news was predominantly a white male enterprise.

“There’s going to be a continuing need to bring more knowledge of the world into journalism through the experience and expertise of people who haven’t made it into newsrooms yet,” he says. “And I do see that happening.”

My favorite Brekke on-air moment is a live interview with KQED anchor Brian Watt from the very last A’s game at the Coliseum. Listen to the audio shared above, and at :55 you will hear Brekke overcome with emotion as he tells the audience: “What a beautiful, beautiful thing baseball is.”

Leave it to him to tell the core story of the A’s departure as concisely as possible: through a crack in his voice.

Former KQED News anchor Cy Musiker says he likes to think of Brekke riding the ferry home after work, “having a beer and sometimes riding back the other way, just because he’s in a conversation with somebody and he’s enjoying himself so much. He loves the Bay Area.”

The turnout at Brekke’s retirement event was huge. Talking with people about his departure, I realized it’s not just his reporting, editing and wit that stood out. It’s that his single-minded fidelity to the practice of journalism made him something of an organizational moral center.

He will be missed.

By the way, if you run into Brekke on the ferry, ask him about the salmon. He likes talking about that.

A small sample of Dan Brekke’s work:

• Panel Weighed Oroville Spillway Failure in 2014 — and Called It ‘Highly Unlikely’ (KQED)
• Could ‘Green Spot’ Be Sign of Trouble for Oroville Dam (Science Friday)
• Video Evidence Appears to Contradict SFPD Account of Mario Wood Killing (KQED)
• The Family Dispute Behind the Infamous Bernal Heights Rent Hike (KQED)
• An Eye for the Strange and Wonderful: Remembering KQED’s Patricia Yollin (KQED)
• I’m Dan Brekke, Transportation Reporter for KQED – Ask Me Anything (Reddit)
• Poetry Priced Out: Rent Hike Forces Emeryville Laureate to Move (KQED)
• The Real, True Story of the Mystery of the East Bay Walls | Bay Curious
• After His Death on the Street, a San Francisco Tent Resident’s Story Comes Into Focus (KQED)
• Infospigot – Dan Brekke’s blog
• Casual Carpooling Has Officially Returned to the Bay Area (KQED)