Kate Fishman covers environmental regulation and natural resources on California’s north coast for The Mendocino Voice, a news site. She has worked as a field editor with Patch Media and covered several towns in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, writing about the volatility of school boards and the impact of COVID-19 and climate change on communities. Fishman’s journalism career started with profile writing for her local paper in New Paltz, New York when she was in high school. At Oberlin College, she reported on arts and culture and eventually became the managing editor of The Oberlin Review, the student paper that serves the city of Oberlin, Ohio. She loves to teach, and practice, writing of all genres.
Beat: The effect of environmental regulation on salmon runs, wild fires, the economy and other issues
Here on the North Coast our entire economy and way of life have long been structured around nature and the legacy of natural resource extraction. First with fishing, logging and ranching, later with cannabis, wine, and even carbon-credit sales. This means that environmental protection and regulatory agencies have a disproportionate impact on us, as do large logging, wine and ranching companies. What’s more, most environmental agencies, from the Board of Forestry to the Regional Water Board, to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, are state agencies, and are poorly examined by media. This beat involves covering these board meetings with regular government reporting, breaking news on important policy shifts as well as environmental occurrences such as salmon run numbers and wildfires, working on enterprise stories exploring deeper issues and engaging in some investigative pieces into the major corporations that control so much of our land and environment—focusing on the impacts to local residents but with a regional perspective.