In its second full year of operations, the Vallejo Sun has continued to lead the conversation in numerous issues affecting the city of Vallejo and the surrounding region, and continued our mission of providing high-quality, accurate, and timely content, helping to keep the Vallejo and Benicia communities informed. We’re publishing this report to help you understand our operations, what we’ve accomplished, and what we hope to do in the future.

In 2023, the Sun produced 248 unique articles, down from 333 in 2022. On average, the Sun published about 20 articles per month, down from 25 in 2022. 

This decline in productivity can mostly be accounted for by the departure of founding member John Glidden in March, who was the Sun’s most prolific writer and laid the groundwork for the Vallejo Sun with his self publishing efforts in 2020 and 2021. Glidden has been Vallejo’s most dedicated journalist for a decade, and his departure left big shoes to fill.

But we remain committed to bringing you the news, and to fill the gap we added six new contributors since late 2022, with a renewed emphasis on arts, housing, business and education stories. These new voices have expanded our breadth of coverage and brought you even more of the in-depth news you've come to expect from us.

Meet our newest contributors:

Ryan Geller writes about transitions in food, health, housing, environment, and agriculture. He became a contributor to the Vallejo Sun last year and took on the city hall beat after Glidden’s departure and has become a core contributor to the Vallejo Sun. Geller has particularly excelled at housing coverage, including a series on the city’s efforts to remove people camping in the White Slough area.

Gretchen Zimmermann started volunteering with Vallejo Open Studios in 2010, launched the Vallejo Arts and Entertainment website in 2014 and creates mixed media sculpture at Mare Island Art Studios. Zimmermann joined the Vallejo Sun last year to contribute arts coverage, but has also become an investigative journalist, publishing stories about the conditions of Vallejo’s waterfront and a tragic death at Kaiser.

Zack Haber is an Oakland journalist and poet who covers labor, housing, schools, arts and more. They have written for the Oakland Post, Oaklandside and the Appeal. Zack has contributed labor and business stories, including an investigation into businesses run by Vallejo businessman Buck Kamphausen.

Janis Mara is an award-winning San Francisco Bay Area-based journalist. She has contributed community stories to the Vallejo Sun, such as about Vallejo’s Open Studios event and weekly free coffee tastings at Moschetti Artisan Coffee Roaster.

Holly McDede is a fill-in reporter and producer at KQED radio in San Francisco where her reporting focuses on sexual misconduct in schools as well as efforts to curb fatal drug overdoses. McDede lent her expertise to a story about a new lawsuit that revealed a decades-old abuse allegation at a Vallejo high school.

Tyler Lyn Sorrow is a library sciences, anthropology and journalism student at City College of San Francisco. She is an award winning illustrator and the winner of the 2023 Baker Morrell Scholarship award in photography. In addition to freelance photography, she provided the illustration for our investigation of SafeQuest Solano.

Brandy Collins is a writer, public services advocate and self-proclaimed Professional Aunty living in the Bay Area. Brandy's work has appeared in Oakland Voices, Oaklandside and Berkeleyside-Nosh. Collins contributed an interview with musician Bryan C. Simmons, who grew up in Vallejo.

Yousef Srour is a Vallejo-born, LA-based music journalist, specializing in coverage of the Northern California hip-hop scene. His work has appeared in Passion of the Weiss, Stereogum and the FADER. Srour contributed an article on Vallejo’s hip-hop scene and plans to make more contributions on music in Vallejo in 2024.

The Vallejo Sun continues to have an impact

Despite our small team, the Sun’s reporting continues to have an impact. Our reporting has spurred calls for investigations, reportedly cost a former Vallejo police officer his job, and has led the City Council to reverse a decision because of apparent violation of state public meeting law.  

Vallejo police accountability

Former Vallejo police Officer Ryan McMahon shot and killed two people when he was with Vallejo police. He killed Ronell Foster on Feb. 13, 2018, and then was one of six officers who killed Willie McCoy the next year. McMahon was eventually fired when he fired at McCoy he fired from behind another officer, putting that officer's life in danger.

Months later, he was hired by the Broadmoor Police Department, a small department on the Peninsula. But earlier this year, the Vallejo Sun reported even more problems that McMahon had in Vallejo. He was flagged for poor performance in connection with seven different incidents in 2018, including endangering another officer during a pursuit. McMahon sued the city and said that he left Broadmoor after the new revelations.

Investigation into nonprofit

Our investigation into domestic violence nonprofit SafeQuest Solano took nearly a year of painstakingly documenting allegations that SafeQuest had allowed an executive to live in a safe house rented from the city of Fairfield for $1 that was supposed to be used as emergency housing for domestic violence victims. We fought the city of Fairfield and the Governor's Office of Emergency Services for records, interviewed several former employees, and confronted SafeQuest with our findings.

Since our report, U.S. Rep. John Garamendi and state Sen. Bill Dodd have both said the allegations against SafeQuest should be investigated and the city of Fairfield has sought to cut ties with Safequest. 

Government transparency

In June, our eagle-eyed city hall reporter Ryan Geller spotted an item on the city council's consent calendar allocating money for a new dispatch center at 400 Mare Island Way, the controversial site where the city had intended to move the Vallejo police headquarters but backed away after community backlash. It turned out the council had never given direction to move the dispatch center in the first place.

Geller checked the budget documents, which had discussed building a new dispatch center at City Hall.  When Ryan asked the mayor about it, he said he'd given direction to move it to Mare Island Way in a private meeting with the city manager. But as some concerned residents and the First Amendment Coalition pointed out, if every member of the council had given direction that way, it would violate the state's open meeting law.

The city backed off the plan to move the dispatch center to Mare Island Way. At tomorrow's council meeting, they'll officially rescind the decision, and the new resolution says that the last one was an "error."

Fighting election misinformation

In July, we followed up on an invitation we got from a new Solano County group that was hosting an event about voting data. The person scheduled to speak – Douglas G. Frank – was a notorious election denier who had toured the country spreading discredited theories about the 2020 election. Also, the group seemed to be connected to a national extremist movement and on its webpage proclaimed that Sheriff Tom Ferrara was a "constitutional sheriff," a fringe movement that believes that sheriffs have the ultimate authority to enforce the U.S. Constitution.

The sheriff denied that he had told the group he subscribes to that ideology. The group refused to answer our questions or tell us who their leadership was. As we were getting ready to publish our story, they canceled the event and took down their webpage. We published it anyway, but sometimes journalism can have an impact before you even publish.

The Vallejo Sun continues to be recognized by our peers

The Vallejo Sun received six journalism awards this year for our work in 2022. That includes three journalism awards from the San Francisco Press Club this month:

• We took second place for investigative reporting for our story detailing deaths and problems in the city's Project RoomKey program.
• We also took second place in the best news story category for our report on leaked documents that showed why a review officer recommended overturning termination for the Vallejo officer who killed Sean Monterrosa.
• And we took second place in the podcast category for our eight-episode investigative podcast, which covered topics such as Vallejo police, homelessness, and the history of the city's waterfront.

We also won three California News Publishers Association awards in May:

• First place for best podcast.
• Second place local government reporting 
• Second place for election coverage for our coverage of the November 2022 local elections in Vallejo and Benicia.

The Vallejo Sun’s main source of support is from readers

The Sun is mainly reliant on subscription revenue and reader support. Its weekly newsletter has thousands of subscribers. It earns some additional revenue through advertising and content licensing.

The Vallejo Sun is organized as a collectively owned LLC and is a for-profit company. We partnered with the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor this year so we are able to accept tax-deductible contributions for the first time. 

We had our first-ever event, a party for our subscribers to celebrate our second anniversary, at Mare Island Art Studios in September. You can see video of our presentation from that event here:

The Sun is hosted on Ghost, a nonprofit publishing platform, and receives technical support from Outpost, a California cooperative venture to support independent publishing.

Here's some of what we want to do in our third year:

• We are the only publication in Vallejo carefully tracking what's happening — and not happening — with development of the waterfront and we plan to continue this work. 
• We want to do more follow up on past stories, such as what happened with proposed projects in the city that appear to have gone nowhere. 
• We want to report more on environmental justice issues, with more emphasis on their impact on residents. 
• We want to add new arts contributors — especially to report on all the great music in Vallejo. 
• We want to expand our team to include more diversity to better reflect the population in Vallejo. This would include adding more contributors and seeking to partner with local high schools and colleges.
• We want to revamp our event listings so that it's easier than ever to find Vallejo events.

Thank you for your interest in the Vallejo Sun and we look forward to providing you with important community journalism in the years to come.