Join us in making news! Voices of Monterey Bay Our region's first nonprofit, multicultural news source

VOICES OF MONTEREY BAY | Announcements

Welcome to Voices of Monterey Bay. Be sure to sign up for our free newsletter and help us bring a new kind of news to the Central Coast.

We refer to ourselves as VOMB for short. Or simply Voices.

Whatever you call us, we hope you will find that we are an essential news source for the Central Coast. Voices is the creation of three veteran journalists: Mary Duan, Joe Livernois and Julie Reynolds Martinez. We are committed to delivering solid investigations and compelling features to a region that is currently underserved by its daily newspapers.

Significantly, Voices of Monterey Bay is the region’s first-ever nonprofit, bilingual, multicultural news operation. It is a refreshingly new approach to news, and we believe vomb.org will turn local journalism on its ear and will change your expectations for local news and storytelling. In addition to stories posted by our veteran crew, we invite those who have never had a voice to share their stories with the world.

Better yet, VOMB has a strong education component that provides hands-on journalism training to young men and women who wish to tell the stories of their own communities. Our goal is to give residents of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties an online news source that offers deeper insight into local issues while introducing new voices to tell our area’s untold stories.

As a not-for-profit affiliated with the Institute for Nonprofit News, VOMB can concentrate on what readers, viewers and listeners are looking for in a news operation: Journalists who can provide context and a clear picture of the issues that impact the Monterey Bay and who can tell a good yarn, without worrying about profit incentives or about serving special interests. With newspapers downsizing and with reporters under attack all over the world, the need for nonprofit journalism is clearer than ever.

Our Voices
At Voices, we explore local issues by asking overarching questions that put our problems in a universal context. And as a bilingual, bicultural news site, we aim to close gaps between various segments of our rich and diverse region to find common ground.

In the coming months, we’ll be tackling investigative and in-depth stories from our two counties that you won’t see anywhere else — stories told through in-depth articles, videos and podcasts.

Youth Voices
We also train young people to tell their own stories, which we publish on vomb.org. Just this summer, we spent two weeks with our colleague Marcos Cabrera, training 13 young journalists in Salinas. Many never worked on a high school paper, but they dug in and reported insightful stories about teen mental health, gender issues, the local economy — and produced thoughtful opinion pieces about controversial topics like the presence of police officers in schools.

These intrepid teens are now empowered to ask tough questions of local officials and help shape the future of their communities.

Your Voices
If all this inspires you, we invite you to add your voice to our effort. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, which will keep you abreast of our stories, of other efforts we admire from throughout the nonprofit journalism world, and of the upcoming community events Voices of Monterey Bay will sponsor. The newsletters will be breezy, informative and useful, and we promise we won’t overwhelm your inbox with our messages.

In addition to our news site and our training component, Voices is scheduling community forums, coffees and “pop-up magazines” throughout the Central Coast. If you sign up to our newsletter, you will automatically be invited to attend our first major event, a pop-up presentation scheduled on Nov. 16 at the Haute Enchilada Social Club in Moss Landing.

Everything we offer is free, but it doesn’t come without cost. Once you get a feel for us, we hope you’ll consider making a tax-deductible donation to support the work we do. Voices has been selected as one of 130 nonprofit news outlets to take part in NewsMatch, a nationwide effort to support local and investigative news. This means that every dollar you contribute to our effort will be matched, dollar-for-dollar, up to $1,000, through the end of the year. You can make your tax-deductible donation here, or here.

Read us for a while. Explore our site. Sign up for our newsletter. Let us show you what we’re about, how we’re unique and why we’re worth supporting.

About VOMB

Voices of Monterey Bay is a nonprofit online news source serving California's Central Coast.