The Peninsula Press is a hyperlocal news site powered by Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Journalism. Student journalists cover local news in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and other cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties.

Xandra Clark, @xandraclark, comes from a patch of woods outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She covers education in Palo Alto for the Peninsula Press and is especially interested in how the arts, technology, and adult-student interactions impact learning. As a senior producer and events director for the Stanford Storytelling Project, she writes, edits, and produces for the weekly radio show State of the Human; leads storytelling workshops and never sleeps. She earned a bachelors degree at Stanford in Theater and Performance Studies and has gone from playing roles like King Lear, Juliet and a Bearded Lady to teaching a course for elementary schoolers on building compassion through drama. Someday, she’ll open a bakery, where there will be lots of molten chocolate cake — of the dark and dense variety.

 

 

Xiaohuo Cui, @cuixiaohuo, was a journalist in mainland China before arriving in California this fall, when he quickly develops a hobby of watching Californians dancing to Gangnam Style in their convertibles. Xiaohuo covers public issues in Menlo Park. Xiaohuo published over 600 stories on politics, culture and sports while he worked for China’s English national newspaper. He is the deputy web editor for the Peninsula Pressthis fall.

 

 

Caroline Davis, @Carolinekdavis, covers San Mateo County with a focus on the transportation and travel beat. A recent (and likely permanent) transplant to the Bay Area, Caroline is an east coast native hailing from Ridgefield, Conn. She earned her B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, with a specialty in print journalism, at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. Caroline has interned and freelanced for a variety of publications, including The Seattle Times, Travel + Leisure, Ridgefield Magazine and Bedford Magazine, among others. She has experience in public relations as well, having spent the past three years working for the travel and tourism practice of Hill + Knowlton in New York City. Caroline is an avid runner and finished her first marathon last November during the ING New York City Marathon.

 

 

Ryan Eshoff, @RyanEshoff, comes from San Jose. He covers the city of San Carlos, especially the city government. He has a Bachelor’s degree from UCLA. Ryan has a good enough memory that he was able to memorize the entire original Star Wars trilogy, but rumors that he doesn’t need to use notes or a recorder in his interviews are unfounded.

 

 

 

Rachel Estabrook, @restabro, comes from New Hampshire. She covers Santa Clara County, especially issues related to immigration. Rachel went to school in Washington, D.C. and previously worked at the Department of Justice and NPR. She speaks Spanish and likes hiking, biking and National Parks. Her favorite biking route near campus has to be the Stanford loop.

 

 

 

Sam Fisher, @samfisher908, is from Westfield, New Jersey, but has spent most of his time at Stanford since the fall of 2010. He covers Palo Alto City Government, especially the theme of redevelopment. Sam is currently a junior at Stanford, majoring in symbolic systems. In addition to his work for the Peninsula Press, Sam covers Stanford football for the Stanford Daily and does play-by-play announcing for Stanford football and Stanford baseball on KZSU. Most of Sam’s personality traits can be explained by his upbringing as a Philadelphia Eagles fan in a neighborhood of all New York Giants fans.

 

 

 

Riva Gold, @GoldRiva, covers Palo Alto’s city government for the Peninsula Press. Originally from Toronto, she studied philosophy and religious studies at McGill University before moving to Tel Aviv to work as an intern for Haaretz. Since then, she has written for toronto.com, BlogTO, GlobalTV and several other Canadian publications. She is currently an intern for KQED’s Forum.

 

 

Chelsea Janes, @CJanes15, grew up in western Massachusetts and earned her undergraduate degree at Yale University in Connecticut. She covers Santa Clara County for the Peninsula Press, focusing on the 49ers new stadium project and the city government. Prior to coming to Stanford, Chelsea covered the San Diego Padres for Major League Baseball’s MLB.com and reported on the Olympics and soccer at USA Today, in addition to working as a reporter and sports columnist for the Yale Daily News. Chelsea played varsity softball at Yale, is a die-hard Yankees fan, and takes no day spent in California weather for granted.

 

 

 

Alexei Koseff, @akoseff, grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., and attended Stanford University, where he majored in American Studies and minored in Spanish. He covers East Palo Alto education for the Peninsula Press. He has previously interned at the Orange County Register, the Monterey County Weekly and the San Jose Mercury News. Alexei is a product of bilingual education and is fluent in Spanish. He studied abroad in Madrid, Spain, for six months during college.

 

 

 

Kristina Krohn, @GlobalHealthDr, comes from Minnesota. She covers the East Palo Alto beat, especially health. She earned her medical doctorate at the University of Minnesota and is this year’s Stanford/NBC News Global Health and Media Fellow. Through the fellowship, she spent the summer in Delhi, India; Vientianne, Laos and Geneva, Switzerland, working with the World Health Organizations in communications. In addition to journalism classes this fall she is also taking “aerial fabrics” class, or as she calls it, introduction to circus stunts.

 

Anna Li, @AnnaWanderland, comes from Auckland, New Zealand. She covers Cupertino, with an emphasis on digital technology and the environment. She is a graduate student in Journalism at Stanford University. Currently, she works as a digital media evangelist with the Stanford Digital Media team. She is also the data editor for the Peninsula Press. As an undergrad, Anna studied marketing and social networks research. Anna graduated in 2011 with a degree in Communication at the University of Southern California. In her spare time, Anna enjoys traveling, speaking different languages and discussing film noir.

 

 

 

Melissa Pandika, @mmpandika, grew up in the Bay Area and covers urban development in San Jose. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2009, she worked at UC San Francisco, where she researched how aggressive brain tumors evade therapies. In addition to the Peninsula Press, Melissa writes for the Stanford News Service. She has a soft spot for whales.

 

 

 

Danielle Radin, Danielle comes from Hermosa Beach, Calif. She covers Half Moon Bay city government. She currently contributes Patch.com in Half Moon Bay as well as Paste Magazine. Previously, Danielle was a newspaper reporter with the Easy Reader in Southern California and was a music reporter for the Valley Scene Magazine for five years. Danielle graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a double major in rhetoric and comparative religion and a minor in creative writing. She has a pet chinchilla named Babs and a 14-year-old Siberian Husky.

 

 

Ravali Reddy, @ravaliareddy, comes from Dublin, CA. She covers East Palo Alto City Council, with an emphasis on its workings and goals. She is currently a junior majoring in communication at Stanford University, where she also works as a senior staff writer for the Stanford Daily. Ravali also spent the summer of 2012 working as a reporting intern for the Sacramento Bee. When she isn’t busy reporting, Ravali can often be found enjoying an episode of “Arrested Development” or a slice of cheesecake.

 

 

 

Julia Reis, @julia_kate22, is a Bay Area native who reports on education in San Jose. She received her bachelor’s degree in modern literature from the University of California Santa Cruz in March 2012 and has previously worked for the Half Moon Bay Review, Good Times Santa Cruz and other print and broadcast entities. In her free time, Julia likes to read, go running and watch sports.

 

 

 

Ian Yakob, @ianyakob, has roots in Greater Philadelphia, and he covers Mountain View’s city government and tech culture for the Peninsula Press. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and philosophy from Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he reported for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s sister publication, Community Newspapers Inc. Ian also works for University Communications at Stanford.

 

 

Managing Editor:

Kathryn Roethel graduated from the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism in 2010. As a student, she co-founded the Peninsula Press and is now the site’s managing editor. Originally from Prescott, Ariz., Kathryn earned her undergraduate degree at Northern Arizona University and worked as a speechwriter for Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano. She also worked on the communications staff of the Make-A-Wish Foundation and was a volunteer wish granter. In addition to her work at Stanford, Kathryn is a weekly contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle’s health and feature sections and has written for U.S. News and World Report.

 

 

Faculty Advisors:

R.B. Brenner spent most of his waking hours in newsrooms for three decades, before joining the Graduate Program in Journalism. He held several top editing positions at The Washington Post, including Sunday Editor, Metro Editor and Deputy Universal News Editor. He was one of the primary editors of the Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
R.B. started teaching at Stanford University in September 2010. Along with other faculty, he helped students in the Graduate Journalism Program launch the Peninsula Press, a multimedia news website covering Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

He has been an Ethics Fellow at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a journalist in residence at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked with actors Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams as the journalism consultant for the film “State of Play,” in which he has a cameo role.

He began his reporting career at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina and then moved to California to work at the San Diego Union-Tribune – first as a reporter, later as a senior editor – before joining The Washington Post in 2002.

 

Joel Brinkley is the Hearst Visiting Professional in Residence. Brinkley joined the Department of Communication in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. There, he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent.

At Stanford, Brinkley writes a weekly op-ed column on foreign affairs that appears in about 50 newspapers and Websites in the United States and around the world each week, syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He is also a foreign-affairs writer for Politico and maintains an active public-speaking career. His areas of research include American foreign policy and foreign affairs in general, as well as the future of the nation’s newspaper industry.

Brinkley is a native of Washington D.C., and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal before joining the Times in 1983.

At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York and Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign-policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006.

Over the last 30 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and in the following years was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer (for one, as a member of a team). He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006.

Mr. Brinkley is the author of five books: Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, published by Public Affairs Books in 2011; U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr) published by McGraw Hill in 2001; Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television, published by Harcourt Brace in 1998; The Circus Master’s Mission, a novel, published by Random House in 1989; The Iran-Contra Affair (with Steve Engelberg) published by Times Books in 1988. He has also contributed to several other books, including the chapter on George W. Bush in The American Presidency, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004; and Israel: The Historical Atlas, published by Wiley in 1997.

 

Ann Grimes is the Director of the Graduate Program in Journalism and Lorry I. Lokey Professor of the Practice at Stanford. She is a former staff writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal where she covered technology and business. As Deputy Bureau Chief in San Francisco, she oversaw the newspaper’s coverage of Silicon Valley during the 1990′s dot-com boom and bust. While at Dow Jones & Co., she also worked on developing new-media strategy.  Earlier, Grimes was on the editorial staff of The Washington Post. As the Deputy National Editor responsible for coverage of the federal government, she ran a national news section that covered the political spectrum. Starting out, she wrote about social issues in Chicago and contributed regularly to The New York Times.

Grimes is the author of Running Mates, a book about the 1988 presidential campaign published by William Morrow & Co. and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.  She is the recipient of several journalism awards including the Society of Professional Journalist’s Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism, the Education Writers Association National Award, and two Chicago Newspaper Guild Awards.

A former teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Grimes teaches classes in technology reporting, digital media and entrepreneurship. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Georgetown University and an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago. She was a 1997-1998 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

She just received a MediaX grant for her project “Transparent Social Footprints: A New Road to Digital Dollars?” exploring consumers’ behavior with online news content and advertising with Jeff Heer, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford.

 

Tom Hayden teaches writing, communication and environmental sustainability through the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in the School of Earth Sciences. He also teaches a specialized reporting and writing course in environmental journalism, and is affiliated with the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Hayden’s journalism career began at Newsweek magazine in New York, where he started as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow in 1997. In 2000, he moved to US News & World Report in Washington, DC, where he covered science, the environment, medicine, culture and breaking news as a senior writer. Since 2005, Hayden has been a freelance journalist, writing for publications including National Geographic, Smithsonian, USA Today and the Washington Post Book World. He has reported from South America, Europe and Asia, and from New Orleans to the Canadian Arctic.

Hayden is coauthor of two books. He wrote the 2007 national bestseller On Call in Hell, about battlefield medicine in Iraq, with Navy doctor Richard Jadick. In 2008 he collaborated on Sex and War, about the biological evolution and cultural development of warfare through human history, with Malcolm Potts of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2005, Hayden taught science writing in The Writing Workshops at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with his wife and fellow science journalist, Erika Check Hayden. He has been a faculty member in the annual Banff Centre Science Communications workshop since its inception in 2006, and has been involved as a speaker and trainer with the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program for environmental scientists since 2000.

Hayden graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a Bachelor of science in Agriculture (honours) degree in applied microbiology and food science, and received an MS in marine biology from the University of Southern California. He completed five successful years of doctoral study in biological oceanography at USC, before leaving science for journalism. He spent more than nine months at sea in all, conducting oceanographic research from Southern California to San Francisco Bay, and from Antarctica to Easter Island.

 

Jennifer Kahn is a feature writer for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, and Outside, among others. Her work has been selected for the Best American Science Writing series four times, most recently for “A Cloud of Smoke,” her New Yorker piece about a policeman whose death four years after 9/11 was not what it seemed. She is also featured in the anthology Best American Sports Writing 2010. A graduate of Princeton University and UC Berkeley, she has degrees in astrophysics and journalism. Since 2008, she has taught in the Magazine Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

 

Geri Migielicz is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism and co-founder and executive editor of Story4, a multimedia production studio, specializing in video for the web, training and consulting. She served as Director of Photography at the San Jose Mercury News from 1993 to 2009. Under her tenure, the Mercury News garnered major national awards for photo editing and photo usage, making the paper a destination for the leading talent in the photojournalism industry because of its innovation in web and print storytelling.

Migielicz was executive producer of a 2007 national News and Documentary Emmy Award-winning web documentary, Uprooted, for mercurynews.com. She worked on the team leading the coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake that won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize in general news reporting for the Mercury News. She also supervised the paper’s coverage of California’s recall election, a 2003 Pulitzer finalist in Feature Photography. Migielicz was a 2004-05 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she studied multimedia narratives.

Migielicz has served as visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and has been an instructor and advisory board member for the Stan Kalish Workshop. She has also been faculty at the Missouri Photo Workshop, and a presenter at workshops held by the Society of Newspaper Design and the National Press Photographers Association. She has a B.J. from the Missouri School of Journalism and did graduate studies in journalism at Ohio University.

 

Gary Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist, and has served the past four years as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.

His fourth and newest book, The Devil’s Tickets (Crown, 2009) is a narrative from the Roaring Twenties about a sensational killing and murder trial in Kansas City and the contract bridge craze that swept America.  National Public Radio hails it as “deliciously detailed and splendidly written.” The Kansas City Star writes, “This is history with a whole lineup of compelling characters . . . Pomerantz handles it all with a stirring sense of story and human behavior.”

Pomerantz spent 17 years as a daily journalist, first as a sportswriter for The Washington Post where he covered Georgetown University basketball, the Washington Redskins and the National Football League, and later at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he wrote about race, sports, culture and politics, and served for a time on the newspaper’s editorial board.

Pomerantz’s first book, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (Scribner, 1996), a multi-generational biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.

His next book, Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds (Crown, 2001), about an air crash, has been published in Britain, Germany and China, and was termed by The London Evening Standard “a flawlessly constructed narrative . . . a masterpiece of non-fiction storytelling.”

His third book, WILT, 1962, a story about race, celebrity and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain’s legendary 100-point game, returned him to his sportswriting roots, and was an Editors’ Choice selection in 2005 by The New York Times Book Review.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in history, Pomerantz was named as a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan in 1987-88. Later he served from 1999-2001 as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta where he taught courses on news reporting and writing, and on the history of the American press.  As a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, he has taught Specialized Writing and Reporting: Sports Journalism, and Reporting, Writing and Understanding the News.

 

Janine Zacharia, the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Visiting Lecturer, was Jerusalem Bureau Chief and Middle East Correspondent for the Washington Postfrom December 2009 through April 2011. During her time at the Washington Post, she reported widely throughout the Middle East beyond Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including assignments in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey. She reported on the uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain as they began in early 2011. From 2005-2009, Ms. Zacharia worked as chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News based in Washington. During this period, she traveled to more than 40 countries with then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior administration and military officials. Ms. Zacharia’s earlier career included five years as Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, and five years in Jerusalem working for various news outlets including the Reuters news agency. She was a regular contributor to the New Republic and has appeared routinely as a cable news analyst on MSNBC, CNN and other networks. She was also a regular panelist on Gwen Ifill’s Friday evening roundtable, Washington Week in Review. During the 2008-2009 academic year, Ms. Zacharia was awarded a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. She earned her Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Literary Studies from Middlebury College and is originally from Long Island.

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