I'm a writer, editor, researcher and multimedia journalist with more than a decade of experience covering sports, technology, politics and the environment. A former assistant editor at Media Matters for America, my work has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the East Bay Express, Oakland Magazine and other outlets. I'm an alumnus of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
I reported a story about an Oakland junior college football team that overcame wildfires, locker room theft, and internal strife to win the 2018 state championship, only to have their triumph tempered when a freshman lineman was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The story earned an honorable mention in the 2020 Best American Sports anthology.
SportsI wrote a feature exploring how PG&E's 2019 bankruptcy threatened to derail a historic land conservation deal in which the company had agreed to return tens of thousands of acres of California wilderness to Native tribes and conservation groups — including a Northern Sierra valley to its ancestral Maidu stewards.
ConservationI investigated how Bay Area cities and counties grappled with California legalizing recreational marijuana in radically different ways. My reporting revealed a patchwork of confusing local regulations that often contradicted their residents' overwhelming support for Prop 64. The story was a finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists' Mark of Excellence award.
PolicyI profiled the actor Michael Horse, best known for his role as Deputy Hawk on the TV show Twin Peaks, and detailed his emergence as a prominent ledger artist, a form of protest art that involves painting tribal scenes over colonizer documents.
ProfileI used the temporary closure of a popular dog park due to lead contamination as a starting point to explore the East Bay shoreline's transformation from pristine marshland to an industrial dumping ground to a modern recreational space. The story revealed how a carefully contained toxic legacy sometimes bubbles up in the present.
EnvironmentI found that Fox News devoted just one minute to covering Qatar's migrant worker deaths during its 2022 World Cup coverage. The network's silence coincided with Qatar Airways' major sponsorship of Fox Sports' tournament coverage.
SportsI discovered that pro-Trump media was touting a baseless voter fraud claim that originated from a billionaire-funded hyperpartisan news site masquerading as a legitimate news.
PoliticsI exposed anti-vaccine Instagram accounts using "link-in-bio" services to dodge Meta's content moderators and profit from spreading medical misinformation.
Platform AccountabilityI exposed how Meta facilitated the distribution of weapon parts and firearms via Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace. The Guardian later reported on my findings.
Platform AccountabilityI tested Instagram's "similar accounts" feature and discovered it was steering users toward anti-vaccine content and health misinformation even though the platform claimed it suppressed the reach of such accounts.
Platform Accountabilitywordsmithsilva@gmail.com
Bay Area, California