How SFGate turned National Parks into a national audience

The effect [of the National Parks Desk] is twofold. One, it’s going to serve these communities and provide them with high-quality, in-depth journalism. But two, there’s just a huge readership market.”

Grant Marek, editor-in-chief, SFGate

Journalists from San Francisco made a major discovery inside the U.S. national parks this year. They found a massive audience.

SFGate, the Bay Area website that was a spinoff of the San Francisco Chronicle, launched a National Parks Desk at the beginning of the year.

It’s yielded huge results, Editor-in-Chief Grant Marek said. The National Parks content is on pace for 40 million visits by the end of this year. In June, the National Parks Desk accounted for 12% of all traffic. That’s quite a bump, considering SFGate has had 300 million visits per year for five years in a row.

SFGate covered national parks in California. Journalist Ashley Harrell, now the National Parks Desk editor, began her coverage by driving up and down the state, making the rounds at all the parks. Despite the extensive travel, Marek and others decided to take a bigger swing.

They recruited and found a few national freelance writers with impressive backgrounds in areas around national parks and guaranteed them work. The writers were assigned to cover a cluster of parks in a specific region, similar to how Harrell covered California parks.

The concept was to find people who knew the areas, the people and the cultures of the areas around the parks.

SFGate found that multiple issues could be addressed while serving numerous audiences at once.

“We’re sort of in a very challenging time for journalism generally, because there are entire communities that don’t have any outlets,” Marek said. “There are entire regions that you know have had their existing outlets decimated. There are a lot of papers I used to work for up and down the state that have been reduced to five people, and they were thriving newsrooms when I left.

“The effect [of the National Parks Desk] is twofold. One, it’s going to serve these communities and provide them with high-quality, in-depth journalism. But two, there’s just a huge readership market.”

SFGate’s coverage is boots-on-the-ground journalism — not travel pieces. Recent coverage has highlighted the impact of the federal government shutdown on national parks. Marek was especially fond of stories about national park employees’ housing contaminated with lead, and another that featured a “rogue ranger” who was tracking national park positions being cut by the federal government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

These were stories, Marek said, that might not have been covered due to the reduced journalism resources in these areas of the country.

SFGate has done this kind of thing before. The organization has stationed journalists in locations just outside San Francisco. Then they put five journalists in Los Angeles. They now cover California from top to bottom. Now, because of the National Parks desk, their reach has expanded to the greater Western U.S.

Joining Harrell on the Desk are Kylie Mohr, Sam Hill and Adrianna Nine, contributing parks editors.

“We're a pretty deeply analytical newsroom, and we want to write stories that our readers actually read,” Marek said. “We want to help people better understand the world they live in, but we have to get people to read the stories. And so for us, a lot of that has been refining how we cover and package things. But we’re also saying, ‘Hey, maybe there’s something out there that people want to read even more.’

“The staff has tripled in size since 2019; we haven’t had a single layoff during that time, which I’m very proud of. I think we really built something, and it’s on the backs of finding things that we think readers will be interested in.”

Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.