Our team provides coverage of Mendocino County’s key stories, including breaking news reports on events as they happen, in-depth coverage of county issues, and stories highlighting the life and culture of the region. The Mendocino Voice is part of the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation, which has full-time 24/7 staff and a large cohort of freelancers.
While we welcome future opportunities to collaborate with other media partners to broaden access to quality local news, The Mendocino Voice is part of the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation and operates with full editorial independence. We are not connected to any other media company besides Bay City News. Our coverage decisions are guided solely by our newsroom values, ethics standards and the public interest.
If you’d like to pitch a story, or are interested in doing freelance work, please check out our pitching guide and we’ll get back to you ASAP. We’re looking for all kinds of content, photography, columnists and reporting work. We also cover regional news at the affiliated LocalNewsMatters.org so check out that free website for news outside of Mendocino County in the greater Bay Area.
Here are some of our key staff:
Lin Due, editor
Lin Due began as an editor and writer in high school and never swerved from that path. She was senior editor at the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper with a circulation of 80,000, then edited the Ecology Center’s magazine before serving as editor of the Kensington Outlook, a monthly newspaper. She has written hundreds of articles on wildlife, the environment, education, sports, gardening, and other topics for alternative newspapers, magazines, and Home and Garden titles.
She won the national food-writing award from the Association of Alternative Newspapers as well as a Project Censored award for an article on gay and lesbian teenagers. She was also awarded the first Excellence in Bay Area Journalism award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She has published three novels and a nonfiction book, Joining the Tribe. That book and one novel, High and Outside, received American Library Association Best Book of the Year awards. Other pursuits include gardening, wildlife, and endangered breeds of livestock; she co-operated a small market garden and sold at the Mendocino Farmers Market for several years. She divides her time between Laytonville, the East Bay, and Santa Rosa.
Sydney Fishman, reporter
Sydney Fishman is a full-time multimedia journalist based in Mendocino County and is part of the California Local News Fellowship program hosted by UC Berkeley. She likes to focus on harm reduction policies, mental health issues, and cannabis legalization. Her primary interest lies in exploring stories related to the aftermath of the War on Drugs. Sydney has worked with various outlets, including KALW Radio, KCBS Radio, The Oaklandside, Berkeleyside, and East Bay Express.
Her work has also appeared in Bushwick Daily, Bklyner, and other New York publications. In 2021, Sydney became an award-winning podcaster for her work on NYU Furman Center’s podcast, In Our Backyard, which highlights the housing crisis in Inwood, New York City.
Susan Nash, reporter and columnist
Susan Nash writes on a variety of topics for Bay City News and The Mendocino Voice, including legal issues, art events, and the effects of increased longevity. She was recently a Fellow at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, where she studied the interaction between social media and democracy, and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity, where she worked on digital literacy and access for older adults.
In an earlier life Susan practiced law in Los Angeles, spending half of her time as a business litigator and the other half representing indigent criminal clients on appeal and defending that practice at cocktail parties. She has been gradually moving north after growing up in Los Angeles and now lives in Mendocino, where there is much less traffic.
Jerome Sagcal, web producer and newsletter editor
Jerome is a web producer and multi-media journalist who manages The Mendocino Voice website and writes the weekly newsletter. He has a background in reporting and editing and also does special project work for LocalNewsMatters.org and Bay City News.
Sarah Stierch, reporter and columnist
Sarah Stierch is an award-winning journalist, opinionist and photographer who splits her time between Mendocino and Sonoma counties. She covers breaking news, lifestyle and weather for The Mendocino Voice and has written for Nuvo Newsweekly, Sonoma Valley Sun, Sonoma Magazine, Wine Enthusiast, The North Bay Bohemian, The Press Democrat and The Huffington Post. Her reporting has been cited by The Weather Channel, The Washington Post, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle and WNYC. Learn more about her here.
Other contributors:
Laura Levy Shatkin, executive producer of Vineyard Vibes
Laura’s background includes an editor-in-chief role for Napa Sonoma Magazine, where she also runs the Napa Sonoma Live podcast. Throughout her career, she has covered lifestyle content for various newspapers and magazines and created captivating videos, podcasts and broadcast content. She loves discovering new ideas in food, wine, spirits and travel. Her work appears in the Chicago Tribune, Make IT Better Magazine, SommJournal, Chicago Reader, Today’s Chicago Woman, Wine & Spirits Magazine, and the list continues to grow. The mediums range from print to video (for private clients and for media) and broadcast lifestyle TV production.
Mandela Linder, freelance reporter
Mandela Linder is a journalist and freelance contributor to The Mendocino Voice, covering stories rooted in her hometown. Born and raised on the Mendocino Coast, she brings a deep familiarity with the region to her reporting. She started her writing journey as a poet in middle school, winning a scholarship to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference at age 15. She found a passion for journalism writing front-page news for The Sonoma State Star, where she loved connecting with people through telling their stories. She went on to work in the newsroom at NBC Bay Area, where she covered the pandemic, protests, wildfires, climate change and more.
Mandela eventually traded the newsroom for the Pacific Crest Trail, hiking from Mexico to Canada before returning to her coastal hometown to raise her new family.
Jenn Procacci, freelance reporter
Jenn Procacci is a journalist, visual artist and small farmer. She has been a resident of Mendocino County since 2010; previously, she was based in Philadelphia PA, where she received her Bachelor of Art in Visual Art in 2005 from Temple University. In 2019, she began working in radio with KZYX Mendocino County Public Broadcasting hosting public affairs program The Cannabis Hour. Her role at KZYX expanded in 2024 as she became a regular contributor to their local news coverage.She is currently working on an oral history project documenting the origin stories of Mendocino County’s back-to-landers and cannabis farmers. Jenn has reported on many topics, but her passion lies with elevating underserved voices and sharing their stories.
Mary Rose Kaczorowski, freelance reporter
Mary Rose Kaczorowski is an interdisciplinary professional based on the Mendocino Coast in Northern California USA and is recognized for her contributions as a journalist, artist, and her years of experience from the grassroots to the United Nations (U.N.) in the areas of policy analysis, environmental Issues, Climate Change, and human rights. She has an extensive background in the nonprofit sector and public policy, engaging with organizations from local levels to the United Nations. Her journalistic endeavors include freelance reporting for The Mendocino Voice, and other online publications where she covers a range of topics. She authors the Substack column Chronicle from the Redwood Coast.
Savana Robinson, freelance reporter
Savana Robinson is a freelance journalist in Mendocino County who received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Cal Poly Humboldt in 2025. She has worked in TV, radio and print as well as digital publication. Born and raised in Mendocino County, Robinson enjoys bringing stories that matter to the community.
Devon Dean, freelance reporter
Devon Dean is an award-winning journalist who spent years as a radio and television broadcaster. In that time, she was awarded an Edward R. Murrow and two Associated Press Awards. She holds a purple belt in Brazilian jiujitsu, is mom to three unruly lab mixes, and her favorite spot is the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens.
Contact Us:
If you’ve got a breaking news tip, please contact us at our central newsroom, which is staffed 24/7.
Email: newsroom@baycitynews.com
Call: (510) 251-8100
If you’ve got a general news tip about a newsworthy event or story, please contact our local news team based in Mendocino County.
Email: info@mendovoice.com
Call: (707) 273-1414
Snail mail: P.O. Box 556, Mendocino, CA 95460
Our back story:
The Mendocino Voice was started in 2016 by Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, both local journalists who wanted to create a useful digital news site for the region. In 2024, the website merged with the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation under publisher Katherine Ann Rowlands.
Katherine Ann Rowlands, publisher
Katherine Ann Rowlands is president of Bay City News Service, publisher of The Mendocino Voice and founder of Bay City News Foundation, which publishes LocalNewsMatters.org. She has worked as a journalist for 40 years, covering news in the Bay Area, Central California and overseas. After a year as a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, in 2018 she bought Bay City News, a wire service that since 1979 has been the backbone of local news coverage in the region, and founded an affiliated nonprofit to support public service journalism.
Kat is also a past president of Journalism and Women Symposium and co-founder of WomenDoNews, a project to get better representation of women journalists in Wikipedia. She is president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition. A Berkeley native, she got her start in journalism as an intern for Bay City News. She is also part of the 2024-25 Leadership Mendocino class. Reach her at kat@baycitynews.com.