In a neighborhood often described by outsiders through a narrow frame of homelessness, drug use and crime, three longtime Bay Area newsroom veterans are working to rewrite the narrative by shifting control of the news to the people who live there.
“We realized it was about listening first — hearing what people actually need and want, and then shaping the newsroom around that,” Laura Wenus said in an interview with E&P.
Wenus, a reporter and editor, has teamed up with investigative reporter Noah Arroyo and community-engagement expert and entrepreneur Daphne Magnawa to launch News Relay Network. This nonprofit startup aims to build a new kind of hyperlocal newsroom. Their first project, The Tenderloin Voice, is being developed in partnership with residents of one of San Francisco's most diverse and densely populated neighborhoods.
The newsroom’s name, unveiled in mid-November, was chosen only after extensive outreach and a community vote. Wenus wrote in a blog post that the process reflected the team’s central philosophy: the people who live in the Tenderloin should help determine what the publication is called, what it covers and how it operates. Residents, not newsroom outsiders, would set the editorial priorities.
Rather than following the traditional model in which reporters and editors decide from afar what stories matter, the founders say they are developing a system in which residents help shape the newsroom, contribute coverage and eventually take on much of the editorial operation themselves.
“We’re going to go beyond reporting and documenting,” Magnawa said. “We want to partner with you. You own this newsroom just as much as we do.”
Building a different kind of newsroom
The three founders met at the San Francisco Public Press, where their work converged around reporting and community engagement. Magnawa led community outreach, Arroyo worked as an investigative reporter, and Wenus held multiple roles, including reporter, podcast host and consulting editor. Arroyo and Wenus later collaborated on the SF Next community-journalism project at the San Francisco Chronicle. Both lived in the Tenderloin at different times, though neither currently resides there.
Their shared experiences led them to question how local journalism operates, even in a city saturated with media outlets. A recent San Francisco government study identified roughly 98 news organizations in the region. However, the founders argue that quantity has not translated into coverage that reflects the lives and concerns of diverse, underserved communities.
Arroyo said they observed how certain voices dominated public conversations while others remained largely unheard. “The structures of the work, the processes of the work and the output were leaving a lot of important things undone,” he said. Reporters, he added, frequently returned to the same sources — government officials, business leaders, established organizations — while residents themselves rarely get to shape the coverage.
The founders believed the Tenderloin, a neighborhood of about 30,000 residents made up of families and small businesses, would be an ideal place to test a more truly collaborative model. They found an immediate appetite for it.
“It was a pretty easy decision,” Arroyo said. “The Tenderloin was our first stop, and we were going to try a bunch of other places and feel it all out. And then we got there, and we started asking people, ‘Is there an interest in this sort of thing?’ And the answer was yes — very loudly yes. They were already thinking in that direction.”
A community with layers of diversity
The Tenderloin is one of San Francisco’s most diverse neighborhoods, home to immigrants and families from Mexico, China, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, alongside a historically significant Black American community. The area also has a large senior population, and many families rely on community services concentrated in the neighborhood.
From the beginning, the founders said residents urged them to recognize both the community’s struggles and strengths.
Soha Abdou, a resident services supervisor at Tenderloin Family Housing owned by the historic Chinatown Community Development Center, said the community’s diversity is its deepest asset. “People who live in the neighborhood come from many places — Mexico, China, the Middle East — but we share a commitment to family,” she said. “You can go knock on anyone’s door, and they will help you. That is this community.”
Abdou said she has spoken with Arroyo about what she hopes a community-driven newsroom could provide. “It’s important that people who live here can say what needs to be said to determine what gets done to make the changes,” she said.
John McCormick, another community worker who has spoken with the News Relay team, said that too much media coverage relies on officials rather than residents themselves. “It’s important that they are put in the driver's seat,” he said. “Too many times people talk about them. No one asks them directly to speak to what is needed.”
He said he hoped the new publication would help build residents’ skills and provide tools to enable them to take part more fully in decision-making. Literacy and language barriers are real, he said, noting that many residents speak Spanish, Chinese or Arabic. “Give resources and education to community members and put them at the center of decision making,” he said.
Arroyo said residents at the listening sessions voiced the same concerns. “This is a must,” he said. He noted that people in the neighborhood often feel others speak for them when decisions are being made — and, sometimes, even within the neighborhood itself.
A print-first strategy for accessibility
Although many residents use WhatsApp, Instagram and group messaging to communicate, the founders said the strongest request was for printed information — a shift from the digital-first strategies common in modern newsrooms.
Arroyo said that residents and service providers emphasized the importance of flyers, printed materials and hand-outs, which are widely circulated in the neighborhood. Some seniors prefer print, and many residents lack reliable internet or electricity. “Based on the direct requests we’ve received, as well as our sense of the area’s needs, the written medium seems the likeliest to reach the most people,” he said.
The Tenderloin Voice will publish both online and in a regularly produced print zine. Arroyo said the team will maintain a minimal social media presence at first, expanding only as resources grow. They hope to eventually add text-message distribution, WhatsApp and possibly audio or video, especially as community members have already offered multimedia contributions.
Language access will also require more funding. English is the most commonly spoken home language in the Tenderloin, Arroyo explained, citing the 2023 American Community Survey. But large segments of the community speak Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. “We’re starting with English,” Arroyo said. “But we’ll need to expand beyond this over time.”
Some residents have already offered to help with translation, Arroyo said. The team wants to ensure translated versions are culturally sensitive and contextually appropriate, not simply direct translations.
“We realized it was about listening first — hearing what people actually need and want, and then shaping the newsroom around that,” Laura Wenus explained to E&P.
Since early this year, the founders have spent months conducting outreach: interviews, small-group conversations, impromptu street discussions and, in October, a large listening session funded by early donations and grants. In blog posts describing their process, they wrote that the goal was to “ask permission” before launching a newsroom — a reversal of the traditional model, where journalists simply arrive and start reporting.
The listening session shifted their thinking. They came prepared to discuss editorial processes and structure, Wenus said, but residents focused on something more fundamental: how the newsroom would hand over the reins of reporting.
“They were so busy with the idea of, ‘What kind of content are we actually going to be offering?’” Wenus said. “It shifted the focus of the conversation away from this is how we’re going to make decisions about coverage together and more toward … we’re going to be here to amplify you.”
The team said residents told them they also wanted the newsroom to contextualize information rather than just report it. “People said, ‘I want to hear from a journalist why this impacts my life. I need this. I want to make sense of this information,’” Magnawa recalled. “We’re sense-making.”
One of the most tangible early requests was simple: a community events calendar. Residents said they needed a consistent way to learn what was happening in the neighborhood — a solution the founders quickly prototyped and published in October. They also heard the community wants accountability reporting.
Wenus said the listening-first approach will continue throughout the newsroom’s development. “The work is iterative,” she said. “Listening is part of the workflow.”
Aligning goals with funding
While building the newsroom, all three founders are working other jobs. None draws a salary from News Relay Network for the moment. The team has registered News Relay Network as a California public benefit corporation and is building out its infrastructure in phases based on available funding and resources.
Funding so far includes two grant awards, private donations and a gift from a family member, which have covered early costs such as the listening session, software, insurance, workspace and equipment. The founders have applied for six grants in total, and they’ve been told that having a proof of concept will help their future prospects.
“While our community is demographically poor and sometimes extremely poor, we do believe that people will give,” Magnawa said. Arroyo added that even residents on government assistance have expressed interest in contributing once they can.
The founders eventually hope that donations, government grants available to Tenderloin small businesses and potential city advertising can sustain the newsroom.
The neighborhood actually has a rich history of community-driven journalism, notably the spirited and highly respected Tenderloin Times, which published from the late 1970s into the 1990s, shutting down once funding became tight. Wenus said residents still talk about the paper, and many community organizers cite it as proof that neighborhood-rooted news can succeed.
Looking ahead
The Tenderloin Voice published its first community events calendar this fall and plans to release its first stories, essays and community-authored pieces before this E&P issue prints. The founders expect the publication to evolve as community feedback shapes its direction.
Over the next six months, they aim to assemble an editorial advisory committee of neighborhood residents. Over time, Wenus said, the goal is for local contributors to take on more editorial responsibility. “The dream really would be to build the newsroom, get it in motion, get it funded and then hand off all of the editorial machine — the editing, the reporting, the management — to people from the community so that it really is a peer community publication,” she said.
Arroyo said the long-term hope is that the project will help shift how civic issues are discussed beyond the Tenderloin. “This is difficult, resource-intensive work, but we are building those relationships now because this is the soul of community journalism,” he wrote. “We hope this will have ripple effects on how issues are discussed in the paper of record and halls of power.”
If the Tenderloin model succeeds, Magnawa said, News Relay Network hopes to replicate it in other media-neglected communities, providing backbone support, while local leaders run their own newsrooms across the region and the country.
“We sort of see our network as the umbrella support,” Magnawa said. “We want to do that for the newsrooms that we help build.” Wenus added: “Maybe this model works somewhere else, but it needs to be started by somebody who’s part of that community. Great. We want to support that.”
Arroyo said the model could also contribute to broader civic engagement and trust in information. “Maybe this can be part of a general push toward a healthier democracy,” he said. “But that’s aspirational.”
For now, the focus is on proving the concept in the Tenderloin. “They are a part of newsmaking. They belong,” Magnawa said. “We want to demystify journalism, and we want them to be a part of it.”
Disclosure: News Relay Network is a member of the Tiny News Collective. The reporter on this story works as a consultant for Tiny News Collective but has not worked directly with News Relay Network nor received funding from them.
Diane Sylvester is an award-winning 30-year multimedia news veteran. She works as a reporter, editor, and newsroom strategist. She can be reached at diane.povcreative@gmail.com
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