San Francisco’s ever-expanding independent media scene has a new outlet looking to fill a gap: Hyperlocal journalism about the Tenderloin created by the community, for the community, and led by three SF newsroom veterans: Noah Arroyo, Daphne Magnawa, and Laura Wenus.
The Tenderloin Voice launched on Monday, with stories including a vigil for unhoused people alongside poetry about tacos. The site’s mission is summed up by a simple question: Why not ask readers exactly what they want to see?
Arroyo is a longtime reporter with stints at Mission Local, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the SF Public Press, with a speciality in deep-dives into city governance. Wenus has a background in multimedia journalism at the same publications and, in recent years, hosted the Chronicle’s SFNext podcast. Magnawa is an organizer who consults on startup and journalism operations, and served as the director of membership and community at the Public Press. Arroyo and Wenus also lived in the Tenderloin for several years each.
Arroyo and Wenus bonded during their time as colleagues on SFNext, but the shuttering of the project in late 2023 triggered an existential crisis of sorts. They mulled the idea of smaller-scale journalism curated by residents of an underserved neighborhood, launching the News Relay Network with Magnawa in 2025.
NRN was a vehicle to brainstorm a newsroom in collaboration with the public. Through newsletters, outreach, and in-person discussions, they gathered enough feedback to decide that the Tenderloin would benefit most. They hope to expand to other communities in the future and launch a print zine.
In addition to asking about what to cover, the Tenderloin Voice will prioritize content produced by people in the neighborhood, including those new to journalism and writing.
“We considered what neighborhoods don’t get their say,” Wenus said. “Ultimately, when we started asking around in the Tenderloin, there was a lot of enthusiasm. People could’ve told us to kick rocks. There’s already plenty of coverage about the Tenderloin. But that’s not what happened at all.”
So much coverage of the Tenderloin fixates on crime, overdoses, and disorder. This isn’t the case just with local news, but also in national news organizations. (Conservative outlets like the New York Post seem to have a particular scorn for the place.) However, Arroyo and Wenus noted that the Tenderloin has a rich history of community-driven journalism, including by the Tenderloin Times, which published news from the neighborhood for decades until it folded in 1994. (Copies of the paper can be found on Archive.org.) More recent was the Central City Extra, which published from 2000 to 2017 and can be found archived by the San Francisco Study Center.
The team has been gratified by the community’s response so far, including donations from locals before launch. “This is a community where a lot of people are on very low income, on disability, on social security, so we’re not expecting people to throw us the big bucks, necessarily,” Wenus said. “That being said, people are very, very generous, especially if they’re low-income.”
While the Tenderloin Voice is answering a hyper-local need, it’s reflecting a larger systemic issue: The rising distrust of “mainstream” media outlets. As Arroyo sees it, journalists need to shift toward showing “more accountability” to readers, including changing long-held assumptions about what justifies a story. That includes breaking free of most newsrooms’ fixation on timeliness: The Tenderloin Voice’s most-read pieces this week — poetry and a reflection on the Tenderloin as a pharmacy desert — lacked traditionally “newsy” hooks.
The Tenderloin Voice is headquartered at a shared workspace at 233 Eddy St., and it is, for now, a part-time job for Arroyo, Magnawa, and Wenus. In addition to donations, the publication is seeking philanthropic support and, ultimately, 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The key to growth is local word-of-mouth, and they have plans to distribute the upcoming zine in neighborhood businesses and venues, Wenus said.
“There are a lot of stories about the TL that are written for people citywide,” Arroyo said. “There are not a lot of stories, in my opinion, that are written about the TL for the TL.”
