Moving through California, our journalism review has entered a new income landscape. Circling San Francisco are three of the nation’s wealthiest counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Marin. The first two comprise Silicon Valley, where tech companies have upended traditional media time and again, and promise to do the same again with AI. Billboards along Route 280 advertise virtual assistants that work better than the human mind. To the north, Marin County is a natural wonder, 85% protected land, and the rest is prime real estate for the tech population. These are the cliffs of Point Reyes, the beaches of Sausalito, along which homes go for millions and the median household makes a well-above-average $112k. And in their midst, a little weekly paper chugs along.

This is the Point Reyes Light, a small, family-owned operation that prints every Thursday. The paper has been through a series of owners and survival strategies since its start in 1948, from trials in wider coverage to a nonprofit experiment in 2010.

“They tried to make it into the New Yorker of the West Coast,” said reporter Ben Stocking. “That didn’t work out.”

The current owners, Tess Elliott and David Briggs, work for the Light full time as co-publishers, Elliott as editor, Briggs as business manager, graphics designer and photographer. Stocking is their main reporter, and the paper puts him up in heavily discounted housing to help offset the Marin County cost of living, steep as it is. The Light stays afloat through a mix of charity and advertiser/subscription revenue, and as Stocking emphasized, Marin is not a typical American county in any of these areas.

“It’s not a backwoods town,” he explained. “We have a strong local advertiser base. And there’s a highly-educated population here, they’re engaged, they’re civic-minded. They really pay attention to what we do.”

The Point Reyes Light has won awards for its journalism, including a 1979 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the cultish Synanon Foundation. It has healthy support from the community, but here, wealth plays a role. These are readers with tech salaries and UC Berkeley pensions, and advertisers that cater to them. This moneyed class is a crucial resource for the Light, and one that Stocking believes could be leaned on more. Increasingly, local journalism is reliant on philanthropy, and in Marin County, the coffers are full.

This has not always been the case. A few generations ago, Marin County was a hippie haven, where the only wealthy people were in the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. And before that, ranchers maintained a dairy empire on the peninsula. There are still breaths of these contingents in Point Reyes, as well as a significant Hispanic population, working mostly low-income service jobs. The Light has had trouble reaching them as readers.

The disconnect is bigger than just Point Reyes. California has the fourth-widest income inequality in the nation (New York is widest), and it notably divides along racial lines. Median income for Asian and white families is over 30% higher than that of black and Hispanic families. The top tenth percentile of Californians make 11 times the bottom tenth. The gap is wide, and widening.

Further south, in Monterey County (of East of Eden fame), these troubles are on display. The county seat, Salinas, is over 75% Hispanic – it’s working-class, it’s agricultural, the lettuce fields stretch for miles. On the coast, Monterey is smaller, whiter, wealthier. Most of the news offerings in the county are mass owned, like the Salinas Californian. Media publisher Gannett Inc. so stripped down the newsroom that in 2023, the Californian had no reporters left. The paper began sourcing content from Gannett’s other California papers, and from its flagship, USA Today. Local content ground to a halt. Though there is now one reporter on the staff, the Spanish-language version, El Sol de Salinas, shuttered permanently.

In Monterey, local news is still running. The Monterey County Weekly is independently owned, it publishes in print and has the largest circulation in Monterey County. The paper issues a Salinas-focused newsletter as well, online-only.

Even in California’s wealthiest counties, the search for local news is a challenge. But at the time of this interview, the Point Reyes Light had just hired a young new reporter with hopes of expanded coverage, a broader beat.

Thinking back to when he took the job himself, after a long career at the Associated Press and elsewhere, Ben reflected “I thought my journalism career was over… But up here in Marin, it’s still kicking.”