Mission Local

Joe is the executive editor at Mission Local. He is an award-winning journalist whose coverage focuses on politics, campaign finance, Silicon Valley, and criminal justice. He received a B.A. at Stanford University for political science in 2014. He was born in Sweden, grew up in Chile, and moved to Oakland when he was eight.

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Joe Eskenazi was named journalist of the year in 2019 by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter. He has been managing editor and columnist at Mission Local since 2017. Prior to that, he was a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine for two years and a staff writer and columnist at SF Weekly for nearly eight years. Eskenazi was born in San Francisco, grew up in the East Bay and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

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Lydia Chávez founded Mission Local in 2008 with her students at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. To keep it going year-round, she made it independent in 2014 focused on telling citywide stories from the vantage point of the Mission District. Chávez reported for The New York Times in the 1980s working for the business section, the city desk and the foreign desk in El Salvador and Argentina. She is the author of one book, the editor of another and has written for The New York Times magazine, The Los Angeles Times magazine and George magazine. She has a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in comparative literature, an M.S. from Columbia in journalism and an M.A. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

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Meg Shutzer is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and investigative reporter who joined Mission Local as a senior editor in 2025. Shutzer’s most recent investigation into a juvenile detention center in Louisiana was published on the front page of The New York Times and was a finalist for the Livingston and Dart Awards. A companion film, “8 Days at Ware,” was released on PBS. Their documentaries include “MOTHER” (2024), “8 Days at Ware” (2022, PBS) “Knocking Down the Fences” (2021, PBS) and “New Generation Queens” (2015, Amazon). Meg has taught video journalism at San Quentin State Prison and investigative reporting at U.C. Berkeley.

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