Welcome to Hella News!

The concept behind The Standard’s new weekly comedy news program is pretty simple. A lot of people in San Francisco are well-informed on national news and politics thanks to TV programs like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, but many residents would be hard-pressed to name their district supervisor or talk about the latest policy decisions at City Hall. 

These local decisions—everything from infrastructure projects and votes on housing to City Hall’s ongoing corruption scandal—arguably have a much greater impact on our daily lives than anything that happens in the White House, Congress or the California Legislature.

Our mission here at The Standard is to help San Franciscans know their city better, and we get it: Not everyone wants to read a 1,000-word story on public policy, or sit through a 10-hour public meeting. With Hella News, we hope to provide a dose of humor to help the medicine (i.e. civic information) go down. 

If this requires debasing ourselves to promote greater civic engagement, so be it.

In the first episode of Hella News, co-hosts Josh Koehn and Meaghan Mitchell take a close look at the recently released American Community Survey, an annual U.S. Census Bureau report that breaks down demographics by ZIP code. We sifted through the data to get a better sense of how San Francisco’s neighborhoods are changing by age, race and gender. 

The findings show that certain neighborhoods, like Hayes Valley, have seen their residents’ income skyrocket over the last five years. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods like the Marina and Richmond District have a disproportionate number of women compared to men. Other findings show the city’s Black and white populations are both falling.

Hella News will air weekly on all of The Standard’s social media channels, as well as in this space. Stay tuned!