Dear Reader,
Three years ago today, The Riverside Record published its first story.
It feels like a millennium has passed since I clicked publish on that first post announcing our launch, a lifetime since celebrating the newsroom’s first year and a decade since last year’s post marking another year of The Riverside Record.
Over the past three years, our work has been highlighted in newsletters published by the New York Times, CalMatters, the Los Angeles Times and the Palm Springs Post among others. It’s been cited in grand jury reports, academic studies and even staff reports for public meeting agendas.
The Record has been fortunate enough to receive two grants, $20,000 from the Google News Initiative and $100,000 from Press Forward and has partnered with Los Angeles Public Press to get vital news coverage to an even larger audience, Sunlight Research Center to increase our ability to do in-depth accountability reporting and the Reynolds Journalism Institute to produce a zine product for last year’s school bond elections.
The Record has also been able to partner with the incredible professors at Riverside City College, California State University San Bernardino and Chaffey College, to help future journalists find their footing in the industry. The newsroom has also been able to hire a handful of freelance reporters to cover stories across the county.
Just this month, the newsroom welcomed its first full-time reporter, Daniel Eduardo Hernandez, through the California Local News Fellowship.
None of this would have been possible without you, the readers. Every single person I’ve talked with over these past three years, either in passing or for a story, has been so generous with their time and knowledge. Getting to share your stories is a privilege, and it’s one I will never take for granted.
Journalism, at its core, is about people. It’s why I’ve stayed in this field for the past 15 years, because I care deeply about people and the communities they call home. It’s my fundamental belief that people deserve to live in thriving communities, and one crucial piece for turning that belief into a reality is the presence of high quality local news.
However, as international nonprofit organization Reporters Without Borders notes, the United States is experiencing its “first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history.”
Partisanship is up, civic engagement is down, and I won’t pretend to have all the answers for how to fix it. But I do know that one way to combat this is to support local news outlets like The Record.
You can definitely donate to The Record here, but there are so many other ways to support our work. You can sign up for our free weekly newsletter that comes out every Monday. You can share our work with your family and friends or follow us on our social media pages: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and X. We’re also on Nextdoor, Apple News and, starting today, YouTube.
You can shoot me an email if you think there’s something that we should be covering. My email address is Alicia.Ramirez@RiversideRecord.org. You can also call or text me at 951-906-2653.
If you’re in the city of Riverside, you can also reach out to Daniel at Daniel.Hernandez@RiversideRecord.org, but I’ll let him give you his number.
Being able to run The Riverside Record has been the honor of a lifetime, and I’m so happy I get to do this work in community with all of you.
Onward.
Sincerely,
Alicia Ramirez
Founder/Publisher