2024 was a transformative year for El Tecolote. Over the past 12 months, our bilingual community newsroom worked tirelessly to deliver culturally relevant local news during a high-stakes election year — all while charting a new path in how we serve Latinx communities.
In February, we welcomed a new editor-in-chief, and committed to three big changes: prioritizing digital-first and visually-rich storytelling, launching a program to train the next generation of journalists and fostering deeper relationships with our community to inform our coverage.
These efforts paid off. We grew our website visits by 53%, expanded our presence on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, and saw El Tecolote’s reporting cited by major publications like the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Standard and NPR. Our work was also republished by partners such as KQED, 48Hills and the San Francisco Public Press.
And we’re just getting started. The coming year will test the resiliency of the most vulnerable members of our communities, but we are committed to providing information that is useful, culturally relevant, accessible and uplifting.
Your support is crucial to help us continue this vital work. Through Dec. 31, NewsMatch will double your one-time gift up to $1,000 or match your new monthly donation 12 times, but you have the opportunity to give now on December 3rd during Giving Tuesday! Every contribution helps El Tecolote provide fair and sustainable wages for our talented and dedicated team, empowering them to continue strengthening our communities and amplifying underrepresented voices.
Here’s a look at our top 2024 wins so far, and a vision for what’s next for our newsroom and the communities that we serve.
Building the next generation of journalists
Since its founding in 1970, El Tecolote has been a training ground for emerging journalists of color. This year, we continued that tradition with the launch of NewsHub, a 10-week summer internship program offering students hands-on experience in bilingual, community journalism.
Through weekly workshops, interns developed their skills in community-centered reporting and multimedia storytelling, received safety training and gained insights into emerging career paths from industry leaders.
“El Tecolote has truly given me hope for the future of journalism,” said NewsHub intern Cami Dominguez, who spearheaded our District 9 election coverage. “This newsroom will forever be the place where I got my start.”
In 2025, we plan to expand the NewsHub program by making the workshops available to more students and offering stipends to 1-3 summer interns, who will collaborate with industry mentors on impactful, community-focused projects.
Community-centered election coverage
During this pivotal election year, we relaunched The Pueblo’s Agenda, our civic engagement project designed to make local election information accessible to bilingual communities.
Our election coverage focused on the District 9 race, inviting our readers to help shape the questions that we asked candidates hoping to represent the historically Latinx neighborhoods that make up District 9. We published candidate responses on a rolling basis across our platforms, including our print newspaper, website and bilingual social media videos on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Amid ongoing challenges in SFUSD, we produced a guide for noncitizen voters on how to vote in the school board election. We also published a Spanish-language voter guide in a special print edition of El Tecolote. In partnership with CalMatters and KQED, we highlighted some of the most relevant races and ballot measures for our readers, prioritizing distribution in key Latinx neighborhoods like the Mission, Excelsior, Tenderloin, and Bayview.
On Election Day, we provided social-first coverage that centered Latinx voters and the District 9 supervisor race, and we were the first to call the election for Jackie Fielder. In the aftermath, we published an explainer on what mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s leadership could mean for our communities, as well as a photo essay documenting our communities’ responses to Donald Trump’s reelection as US President.
The Pueblo’s Agenda will continue in 2025, as we remain committed to answering questions and fostering civic engagement among our communities beyond elections as new leaders shape public policy locally.
In-depth coverage of San Francisco’s Latinx RV community
One of El Tecolote’s core strengths is building trust with Latinx communities, working closely with them to report on the issues affecting their lives in order to hold leaders accountable.
Our initial coverage of Latinx RV residents living in Bernal Heights evolved into an eight-month, in-depth and visually-rich documentary of how working-class families fought to maintain their fragile stability amid policies designed to displace them.
Through people-first reporting and public records requests, we exposed the city’s accelerated RV ban and its failure to meet its intended goals. We shared powerful stories and visuals across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, while staying connected with RV residents through a WhatsApp group that provided real-time updates and a guide on policy changes.
“El Tecolote is the official newspaper for us,” said Angela Arosteguis, an RV resident displaced from Winston Drive.
Our RV coverage became one of our most-read series of the year, cited by outlets like the San Francisco Standard and the San Francisco Chronicle. This grassroots approach has cemented El Tecolote’s reputation as a trusted source for in-depth, community-driven journalism. In 2025, we seek to build on this type of reporting when covering other marginalized groups facing imminent threats.
Coverage that unites and uplifts our communities
Amid our ongoing accountability and service-driven coverage, we also kept a pulse on the coverage that uplifts and unites our communities: Latinx arts and culture.
We profiled living artist legends, highlighted rising local musicians and documented grassroots efforts to create and preserve beloved murals in the Mission District. This year also presented the rare opportunity for El Tecolote to cover a unique social-first angle to Copa America that highlighted the city’s growing Colombian community and their passion for soccer.
And of course, we captured major cultural events like Carnaval and Día de los Muertos, and created visually-rich, search-friendly guides that helped readers participate in these celebrations.
Through this coverage, we aimed to inspire pride, connection, and joy among the Latinx audience that we serve, showcasing the resilience and creativity that define the nuances within our shared culture.
What’s next?
We know that our most critical work lies ahead. As a new presidential administration promises mass deportations, San Francisco’s most vulnerable Latinx communities are at risk.
In response, we’re planning initiatives to serve monolingual Spanish speakers with real-time news, public service announcements, and cultural content through our biweekly print newspaper and a soon-to-launch WhatsApp group.
We’ll continue to produce journalism that informs, reframes, and challenges harmful narratives about the communities that we know best — offering explainer guides, accessible news through multiple platforms, and visually-rich features that build empathy and combat misinformation.
Aware that Latinx communities, especially undocumented immigrants, are often scapegoated in national and local narratives, El Tecolote’s role as a trusted authority on our community’s complex experiences will be more important than ever. We’re committed to amplifying underrepresented voices and driving understanding through rigorous, community-first reporting.
Help us continue to provide critical, culturally relevant journalism by donating to El Tecolote today on Giving Tuesday! Through Dec. 31, NewsMatch will keep doubling your one-time gift up to $1,000 or match new monthly donations 12 times.
Together, we can keep serving our communities in 2025 and beyond.