SFGATE launched a National Parks bureau. It led to explosive growth.

San Francisco, a city with 800,000 residents, has more than two dozen news outlets. California, a state with 39 million residents, lost 10% of its newspapers from 2023 to 2024 and now has one county with zero news outlets.

As news deserts in the state have grown, so too has SFGATE’s expansion outside of San Francisco to address them. Over the past six years, we’ve added dozens of local journalists across California to write about communities that badly need it.

We hired them to cover important places just beyond the city — Lake Tahoe, the Central Coast and Yosemite National Park. We hired more to write impactful feature stories about the North Coast and even the skyrocketing costs of Disneyland. Then came a five-journalist Los Angeles team, plus editors focused on everything from mountain towns to the struggling cannabis economy. We now cover California top to bottom, coast to Sierra. 

In January, we took things a step further.

We invested in covering national parks, and not just ones in California that we’ve reported on for the last five years. We launched an entire National Parks bureau, hiring three enterprising outdoors journalists in three different states to help us report on parks across the American West. The team operates under former California Parks editor and now National Parks bureau chief Ashley Harrell.

Those three newsroom additions — Kylie Mohr, Sam Hill and Adrianna Nine — all have extensive backgrounds covering the outdoors and live in the regions they write about, so they can make regular reporting trips to the parks. 

Mohr, our Big Sky contributing editor, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, NPR and Politico, plus big-time outdoors publications like High Country News and the Jackson Hole News & Guide. She’s based in Montana and, since joining SFGATE in February, has been writing deeply about Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier national parks. 

Hill lives in Oregon and covers the Pacific Northwest, focusing on Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Olympic and Crater Lake national parks. He’s a former Outside Magazine contributor who previously worked for National Fisherman magazine and has freelanced for Wired, Eater, Serious Eats and Vice. 

And finally, Nine is our Southwest contributing editor based in Arizona. An Arizona State University alum, she’s a science journalist who has written for local newspapers in Phoenix, where she lives, plus national publications like Business Insider. She now covers the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches and Canyonlands national parks for SFGATE.

We’ve married coverage of all of those clusters with years of best-in-class reporting on California’s outdoors led by Harrell. Plus we’ve grown our California parks coverage in concert to include Bay Area-based national parks reporter Sam Mauhay-Moore and outdoors contributing editor Erin Rode in SoCal. As a whole, our bureau has dug deeply into the many threats confronting the National Park Service, from a changing climate to hostile governance to fewer thoughtful stewards of the land. They’ve written about Yosemite in chaos, the Channel Islands in quiet crisis and a rogue ranger documenting every National Park Service firing. We’ve covered protests, shutdowns and existential questions about visiting the parks. And we’ve dug deep with original, local stories, chronicling Montana’s bold gamble to stop the Yellowstone highway bloodbath, the indefinite closure of Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest and the time two botanists risked everything to raft the Grand Canyon. All the while, Harrell has been tapped to be an expert voice on the parks by both local and national media outlets.

All of that exceptional journalism has led to explosive growth for our site.

In just the first four months of the year, national parks coverage already accounts for 12% of all traffic this year to SFGATE.com. In addition to being the most-read news site on the West Coast, we moved up to the 37th in America in April following back-to-back months as one of the 10 fastest growing news sites in the country month over month. 

In response to our readers’ interests in journalism about the outdoors, we embarked on this major expansion just as the Trump administration began driving national parks off the rails. We put ourselves in position to do deep investigative reporting about a subject that millions of Americans care deeply about, and we’ll continue to do that.

And while we still have more than 30 journalists covering the Bay Area, we now have 30 others in 23 different cities and four different states. They’re turning SFGATE into the voice of the West, at a time when it needs one more than ever.