Students: tackling — and publishing — the big stories

From the first days of their J-200 class, our students report and publish stories. They publish in Richmond Confidential and Oakland North — two thriving local publications run by the school — in regional outlets like KQED, CalMatters and the San Francisco Chronicle and in national publications like NPR and The Guardian. The reporting and filmmaking honed in class is not simply an academic exercise. Real journalism is produced in real time. 

'The Stakes'

The Stakes is a UC Berkeley Journalism project launched in February 2025 focused on Trump administration policies affecting California. Students published dozens of stories at an array of outlets, from  Calliope Arkilic's (’27) story in Richmondside on how a healthy cooking class was a casualty of Trump SNAP education program cuts to Eloise Rollins-Fife’s (’27) story in the East Bay Times and San Jose Mercury News about $600,000 in federal funding cuts that forced a center’s services to scale back to Nicole Caruth’s (’25) Local News Matters story on how ‘wasted’ food filled the gap after cuts to food banks. Read dozens of The Stakes' stories here.

Politics, Culture and the Environment

Students published in national outlets. Aisha Wallace-Palomares’ story about LA artist El Compa Negro aired on NPR. Eli Benton Cohen (’27) had a front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle about an Oakland man who followed the law but was still torn from his home by ICE, with additional reporting by Georgie Pease ('27). Neenma Ebeledike ('25) and Isabella Marzban's ('25) Allensworth Rising was featured in the LA Times Short Docs.

Global reporting

Students traveled the world to produce documentaries and report stories, from "Chasing Whales" that took Zoe Rosenbaum ('25) and Matthew Busch ('25) on a two-week boat trip to Antarctica to Amin Muhammad ('25) and Thomas Sawano's ('25) "The Glacier Wedding" filmed in Pakistan to John Kloptowski's ('25) reporting in Turkey. The Latin America class traveled to Colombia to report last spring.

Faculty: teaching, mentoring, reporting and innovating

Berkeley Journalism’s faculty have one foot in the classroom or editing room, working closely with students to develop and report stories, and another foot in the world of journalism, as writers, audio producers or filmmakers. They are also spearheading major events, such as the Logan Symposium for Investigative Reporting and the Climate Journalism Symposium. 

In 2025, faculty members worked with students to report on and engage with the politics of the moment. Audio Program Director Shereen Marisol Meraji led students in The Stakes Explained — a companion reporting project to The Stakes — with audio and vertical video airing on multiple platforms and featuring UC Berkeley experts talking about unprecedented shifts in government policies and funding. Associate Dean Jeremy Sanchez Rue, who leads the school’s multimedia program, worked with Local News Editor Christine Schiavo to host a mayoral candidate debate in Richmond, providing an opportunity for students to engage deeply with their local community. Schiavo and Assistant Professor Lisa Armstrong created a buzzing election night newsroom where students covered local elections and captured reactions to national and state races.

Faculty also reported on the 2025 elections and ensuing fallout, from Professor Mark Danner’s Getting Out the Fear Vote for The New York Review of Books to Lecturer and acclaimed historian Adam Hochschild’s America was at its most Trumpiest 100 years ago and Donald Trump’s new “American Midnight” is upon us to Professor Elena Conis’ We Need a Reminder of What the Pre-Vaccine Era Was Like for the New York Times and Lecturer Mark Schapiro’s Back to the USSR: Shades of Stalin in the USA. Dean Michael D. Bolden hosted a Commonwealth Club/World Affairs talk with Jonathan Karl: Donald Trump & His Campaign of Retribution. 

Faculty covered other major stories. Lecturer Jenn Kahn’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine in January 2025 explored the massive, hidden and poorly understood problem of chronic pain, sparking a national conversation. Professor Jason Spingarn-Koff served as the executive producer of the season’s LA Times Short Docs as well as executive producer on All the Walls Came Down, a documentary about the L.A. fires that was shortlisted for the Academy Award. Independent Lens re-streamed Associate Professor and Documentary Program Director Jennifer Redfearn’s film “Apart" about three formerly incarcerated mothers.

Faculty also shed light on journalism in these times. Assistant Professor Lisa Armstrong wrote When Neutrality Is a Constraint: Journalism in the 1930s failed to communicate the danger of Hitler’s rise. Are we repeating the same mistake now? for Columbia Journalism Review and Professor Ed Wasserman, former dean, has been churning out op-eds for the San Francisco Chronicle, including Jimmy Kimmel’s treatment opens an entirely new chapter in American media repression and Trump’s ‘quiet, piggy’ jab at a female reporter is much more than a personal insult. 

Faculty continue to be recognized and highlighted. The acclaimed podcast "Code Switch," co-founded by Shereen Marisol Meraji, was listed among TIME's best 100 podcasts of all time. Professor Jennifer LaFleur, who was the public integrity editor on the three-part series “40 Acres and a Lie,” a collaboration with Reveal, the Center for Public Integrity, Mother Jones and PRX. The story — about a U.S. government program that gave more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people land titles only to take the land back — won a string of awards, including the duPont-Columbia Award. That story and an investigation developed at the Investigative Reporting Program led by Professor David Barstow were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

The Daily Californian told the story of Professor Bill Drummond's fascinating career, from covering civil rights in Louisville to working as associate press secretary to Jimmy Carter to teaching journalism at San Quentin. It's worth a read.

In Memoriam

Longtime J-School teacher and mentor Joan Bieder — beloved across generations of Berkeley students and colleagues — died on October 26, 2025. The school held a celebration of her life in December. Read about her legacy.

Alums: reporting what matters, winning awards, leading newsrooms

“Right to Remain Secret,” a two-part story about a secret system that concealed misconduct by California law enforcement officers for decades, by alums Katey Rusch (’20) and Casey Smith (’20), was developed at the Investigative Reporting Program and published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The stories won multiple awards, including the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting. 

Alums Parker Yesko (’16) and Catherine Winter (’87) were on The New Yorker team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting for the investigative podcast “In the Dark” about the 2006 massacre at Haditha, conducted by US forces. Greg Winter (’00), international managing editor of The New York Times, was an editor on two Pulitzer Prize winning stories: one for explanatory reporting for the investigation that uncovered a campaign of forced disappearances in Afghanistan and another in international reporting for coverage of the ongoing civil war in Sudan. Other Pulitzer finalists named included Serginho Roosblad (’22), Marian Carrasquero (’19) and Susie Nielson ('19).

Alum Kathleen Hennessy ('04), the editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune, led the paper through one of the biggest stories of the year, the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis when thousands of immigrants were deported in a climate of fear and lack of due process and two US citizens killed by federal agents. Tamara Keith ('01) is NPR's Senior White House Correspondent, co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America and is a regular commentator on the PBS NewsHour.