California Watch

Bio

Louis Freedberg is a senior reporter focusing on education issues and adviser to California Watch. A co-founder of California Watch, he was its first director until May 2010. Before that, he was director of the California Media Collaborative, based at the Commonwealth Club of California, which joined forces with Center for Investigative Reporting in May of 2009. Until August 2007, Louis worked at the San Francisco Chronicle in a variety of roles: columnist and member of its editorial board; Washington correspondent during the presidency of Bill Clinton; and higher-education reporter. He was a senior editor at Pacific News Service, where he established and directed Pacific Youth Press. He was the founder and director of Youth News in Oakland, Calif., which trained high school students as radio-news reporters. He has written and reported for a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio. He has reported from diverse regions of the world, including Southern Africa, the former Soviet Union and Central America. Louis was the recipient of a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University and an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship. He has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in psychology from Yale University.