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“There’s lots of guilty tech workers in our audience,” Rahawa Haile said. “It’s like they’re tithing.” Haile is a co-owner of Coyote Media Collective (“Independent Journalism with a Bite!”), a fledgling digital project out of the Bay Area. She described Coyote as an outlet pushing against a “protracted campaign to slander the place we live.” That slander has taken the form of seemingly endless reports on crime—Donald Trump recently suggested sending federal troops to San Francisco—and narratives foregrounding the super-rich, super-tech-saturated economy. “Part of what we’re trying to do is prove, like, No, things aren’t fine, but there are human beings who live here and are trying to make life feel great, even if they don’t work in AI, or aren’t billionaires. There’s still people fighting the fight here,” Haile said.
One of the first things you see when you visit the homepage is an invitation to the “Rainbow Bay Bridge,” an aughts-vibed “Memorial Page for the Bay Area’s Beloved Furbabies, Scalechildren, Fishbuds, and Assorted Non-Human Friends.” Pelmo, a cat from Santiago, Chile, rests in virtual memoriam there, as do Gazzy, a rosy boa from Oakland, and Anonymous Skunk, from Berkeley. “Humor,” Haile told me, “is a machete for making the world more tolerable.” The pet memorial, irreverent and moving, seems to exemplify what Coyote is trying to do: channel alt-weeklies, in their nubby, human, off-kilter, and deeply political attempts to chronicle and fight for the culture of a place.
The alt-weeklies of the Bay Area have generally gone the way of Pelmo, Gazzy, and Anonymous Skunk. (I worked briefly as an intern at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which folded in 2014 after forty-eight years of operation.) Coyote started as something of a joke, while Soleil Ho and Nuala Bishari, both formerly at the San Francisco Chronicle, were feeling “burned out,” Ho said, and they wondered if journalism could, as one of Coyote’s taglines became, “be fun.” The name was derived not just from the scrappy, sharp-toothed animal endemic to the Bay Area, but also the legacy of C.O.Y.O.T.E., a sex-workers’-rights group whose title acronymized a demand: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics! “That phrase just kept haunting me,” Ho said. “We are very open about what we care about, not only in this region, but in the world. And I think people find that refreshing.”
At first, Ho recalled, “We reached out to people in our networks, just to ask: What do you think is missing” from the larger Bay Area news landscape? One of the people they reached out to was Haile, who had “done a bunch of freelancing” and written a memoir, In Open Country (forthcoming from Little, Brown), but had never worked in a newsroom. “I’ve just never felt that there’s been space for me,” Haile said. “What Soleil proposed sounded like the first time I actually thought that there’d be space for unrepentant Blackness and queerness, and straight-up criticism of the status quo, which, you know, at this point is fairly authoritarian.”
The group looked at places like Defector and The Flytrap for inspiration. Coyote was born, last June, in opposition to, as the crew put it, the “hedge funds and mismanagement” of mainstream media. The collective’s workers pay themselves, but they all keep other jobs and contribute to the outlet on the side. Readers can access the site on a limited basis for free or join as a member for eighty bucks a year, at the low end, or up to a thousand dollars at the “best friends” tier; there is also a virtual tip jar for donations. Coyote finds extra support from the Tiny News Collective, a nonprofit that assists community-journalism entrepreneurs. The incoming money goes to coaching, publishing tools, and other fees.
Haile’s first piece was a four-thousand-word “meditation on monster trucks.” It was shortly joined by other long-form work: a remarkable investigation by Reo Eveleth on an AI-generated mural in downtown Vallejo, and an accounting by Bishari of the popular fixation with trash-dumping in Oakland. (A New York Times article, noted Bishari, had recently run a piece calling Oakland “a city with more garbage than almost anywhere else.” “The rats that run Manhattan could not be reached for comment,” Bishari wrote.)
Adding to these pieces are hits of cultural goings-on and a column called “First Aid Kit”—a “how-to guide for surviving the Bay Area.” This includes everything from advice for cooking beans at the end of a rent-strapped month to tips for staying safe at protests and news about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (available in both Vietnamese and English). Ho noted that a difficult part of working at the Chronicle was, as they put it, “the overcompensation in terms of perception of bias” that shadowed not just their writing but their personal conduct. “Can I even show up at pro-immigrant demonstrations? Because I’m an immigrant,” they said. “Can I show up to Black Lives Matter demonstrations?” At Coyote, such things are not even questions: political concerns are front and center.
Even so, Coyote doesn’t plan to do something alt-weeklies of yore were known for: endorsements of local political candidates. The closest Coyote will get to this, Haile told me, is satire: recently, a piece endorsed a coyote roaming Alcatraz Island for California governor. Among his sixty-two opponents, his slogan stood out: “Somehow, Actually, Not the Worst Choice.” When I asked about the possibility of endorsing humans, Haile seemed to cringe. “I think a lot of our work does a lot of unofficial endorsing for us: the things that we write, in the way that we write them, from within the belly of the technofascist beast that is the Bay Area.” She added: “I’ve got a lot of political feelings. I’ve got a lot of Oakland feelings. And I am very happy to spend time writing about those in the way that I want, as opposed to hammering them into a framework around electoral politics for candidates that could not give a fuck about me.”
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