Dear Readers,
Welcome (back) to the Bay Area Monitor, again. We are excited to return to publishing longform journalism again to supplement the weekly Monitor Notes. While we won’t be packaging our content cleanly in editions like before, we plan to publish one article weekly, every Monday. This cycle gives us more flexibility in how we cover issues relevant to the Bay Area and allows us to more easily pivot as stories develop. Furthermore, it means more overall stories for you going forward.
We will miss the thematic cohesion of the print editions, so our hope is to release our stories in a series of loose, seasonal cycles. Each three month cycle will feature some overarching narratives and themes that tie individual stories from different beats together. We want reading the Monitor each week to feel a little like reading a serial novel, or a graphic novel featuring the ongoing adventures of Bay Area regulatory agency heroes (ok maybe that’s a stretch).
Starting this month will be our abbreviated summer cycle, concluding at the end of September. In the upcoming articles, we will begin our coverage with a kind of coming home story about the completion of the Bay Trail and a few intrepid women who have walked every mile. We will touch on some previous energy coverage and, looking forward, explore how microgrids have a chance to act as a buffer to increasingly unreliable grid coverage in the face of extreme heat and wildfire risk.
Heat, drought, and wildfire will be prominent touchstones in our late summer coverage (which should come as no surprise for a California resident). We’ll explore the local challenges of restoring Coho salmon habitat and the regional repercussions of ecological decline. As fire season rages we’ll explore Bay Area air quality management of fires whose particulate matter can be perceived as far away as Boston.
With climate issues come equity imbalances, and we will round out our summer coverage with discussions of equity in everything from housing, transportation, and public toilets. Seriously, you might be surprised what a difference it makes who holds the keys to an outdoor restroom facility.
We hope these stories intrigue you, and we look forward to sharing our work with you. See you next Monday.
Michael Adamson
Editor, Bay Area Monitor
