For years Richmond City Councilmember Cesar Zepeda has been on an unsuccessful crusade to persuade the grocery store chains of America — or at least one of them — to bring a supermarket back to his industrial city on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. He’s persistent. He’s called corporate headquarters.
He’s emailed customer relations. Occasionally, he’s gotten executives on the phone, and listened to them stammer on about why Richmond isn’t the right place for them to locate a store, despite its population of 117,000 in the heart of the Bay Area. After years of disappointing conversations, Zepeda has concluded something basic about his city: It is paying a big price by not being able to tell its own story.
Richmond has not had its own daily newspaper for years. The loss came during a period of profound struggles for the town, which has dealt with fluctuating crime, economic problems and environmental challenges. Zepeda and others say there is a lot of good and bad going on in Richmond, but the dearth of local news coverage offers a skewed view of the city — oversimplified and years out of date — as an impoverished and violent community.
“The lack of coverage puts us into deserts of everything. We have a hospital desert. We have a grocery store desert,” Zepeda said.
“Just the lack of any coverage, it affects the perception.” In this news desert, the main information source has been the Richmond Standard, a news website funded by Chevron, Richmond’s.