How does one of San Francisco’s most important legacy magazines celebrate its 50th birthday? According to Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein, the answer is without much fanfare.
“Ah, you know, we haven’t been as self-referential and anniversary-focused as we might have been if the world wasn’t on fire,” Bauerlein said. “Job one is to show up with the journalism in this moment, and somewhere after that is celebrating the anniversary.”
We sat in the loft at Caffe Bianco in the Financial District, sipping on strong coffee just a few blocks from the offices of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which merged in 2024. Bauerlein, who used to serve as co-editor with Clara Jeffery, leads both operations, setting the long-term agenda for how to help two independent newsrooms thrive and deliver some of the best journalism in America.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the seriousness of her reply. Since its inception in February 1976, Mother Jones has punched up with remarkably high-quality, in-depth reporting on politics, conflict, and culture that has made other media outlets look timid by comparison. Named after labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, the magazine operates on a nonprofit model, and has remained in San Francisco since its inception. (Its headquarters is no longer in a tiny space above a downtown McDonald’s, suffused with the unrelenting aroma of fries.)
In addition the the magazine, Bauerlein and Jeffery have overseen the massive online growth of both Mother Jones and the CIR, which combined draw 10 million users a month; she also touts their presence on TikTok and Instagram, where their videos have garnered millions of views.
The longtime editor is not done writing, as Bauerlein pens regular pieces for Mother Jones, often about the media market and quandaries facing journalism today. She chuckled softly before detailing her contribution to the July/August anniversary issue:
“We were so focused on doing journalism in this moment that I finally said, ‘Okay, the anniversary piece, I’ll just go ahead and write that,” Bauerlein told me. “Of course, you know, nine months go by and I actually have to write it, and then it’s like, ‘What was I thinking?’”
I felt that in my bones — old writer habits die hard, I guess — but Mother Jones’ celebration isn’t over yet. In November, the magazine is putting on a photo exhibit hosted by the San Francisco Public Library.
Bauerlein has been in the Bay Area for a quarter-century, a long way from her roots in Europe. She was born in Germany and raised primarily in Italy, where, as a young woman, she developed a “driving curiosity” to learn about the world — even if she had no idea what to do for a career.
Her father, a one-time foreign correspondent, urged her not to follow in his footsteps, “as any journalist would,” Bauerlein told me with a sly grin. Curious about a life in America, she applied for every scholarship she could, ultimately securing a Fulbright that took her to the University of Minnesota. (Bauerlein knew so little about the state that she had to look up the school on a map.) Eventually, the Twin Cities became both inspiration and ground zero for her career in journalism.
Bauerlein experimented on multiple fronts, from freelance magazine to TV and public radio, before settling into a job at City Pages, an alt-weekly that covered news and culture in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She stayed there for nearly a decade, rising from writer to editor to interim editor-in-chief before heading west to join Mother Jones in 2000 as a features editor.
Even then, the industry was in decline. “My career started after the writing was already on the wall. Everybody had a hiring freeze. There was a lament about the future of broadcast news,” she said. “It was clear that large traditional media companies are not as stable as we thought, and certainly are not committed to the public good, necessarily.”
She joined Mother Jones during a transitional phase, with changes in top leadership and an effort to rebuild the staff from the ground up. Almost immediately, Bauerlein saw opportunities for improvement, as with her effort to align the content in the magazine’s pages with “MoJo Wire,” its early daily blog.
In San Francisco, Bauerlein moved into a tidy apartment on Upper Market near the Castro, and found the city to be “really welcoming and comfortable,” albeit with some gloom. “The thing that was weird about it was I got here at the tail end of the first dot-com boom. Simultaneously, there was — not unlike now — a kind of excess of tech money slushing around,” she recalled. “At the same time, the bust was in progress, so it all kind of had a very late-stage-empire feel to it.”
Bauerlein eventually moved to Oakland, following the “nonprofit workers and artists” who had departed San Francisco in search of kinder rent prices. She still resides in East Oakland, an “incredibly diverse community at every level” that she says has welcomed her with open arms.
Decades after arriving here, her fondness for San Francisco remains.
“San Francisco, like any other city, has these archaeological layers that are all alive at the same time,” she said with a soft sigh and a sip of her coffee. “Tech bros, the hippie era, the gold rush era, different communities that have come from far away… They’ve all established themselves in such a way that, even as new things displace them, the legacy is still here.”
One thing that has been a constant in her life here is someone she met back in the Twin Cities: Clara Jeffery.
They first met when Bauerlein was an editor at City Pages and Jeffries was a young reporter investigating sexual assault at Carleton College in Northfield, MN; though their paths diverged in the 1990s, Bauerlein was reunited with Jeffery when the latter joined Mother Jones as deputy editor in 2002. In 2006, they were made co-editors of the magazine.
Bauerlein still fondly recalls an early project she and Jeffery undertook: An investigation into the Bush administration’s disinformation campaign to justify the war in Iraq. The media had been “very complicit” in spreading this disinformation, Bauerlein observed, and it felt like the right time to throw a counterpunch.
“It felt really good to have the independence, to not be part of the consensus. We had the ability to hold much of the rest of the media industry to account,” she said.
Perhaps the biggest shift in Bauerlein’s career came in 2015 when she took over as CEO of Mother Jones. She had never expected to be in such a position, and disliked the sensation that writers and editors now saw her as the big boss rather than as a peer. Some elements of the job left her “terrified,” too, like fundraising.
“Somebody has to, you know, try to keep the thing afloat,” she said.
As we finished up our drinks, I thought of another ship trying to stay afloat after a rough patch. I couldn’t help but ask a deeply unserious final question: As Mayor Daniel Lurie loves to say, is San Francisco back?
Bauerlein swirled her cup, as if deep in thought, and hit me with a questioning tilt of the head.
“I don’t think it ever left!”
