California Watch

Bio

Louis Freedberg was formerly executive director of the California Media Collaborative, which sought to devise new strategies for covering key California issues. The Collaborative joined forces with CIR 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, now New America Media, 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 doctorate in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale University.