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The decline of Salinas’ 152-year-old newspaper leaves residents hungry for a trusted watchdog and worried about what stories won’t be covered.

The 152-year-old Californian employed only one journalist until December. That’s when the paper’s last reporter quit to take a job in TV. The departure marked the latest and perhaps final step in a slow-motion unwinding of what used to be the principal local news source in Salinas, a city of 163,000 that was the hometown of John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who once worked as a war correspondent.

The decline of Salinas' 152-year-old newspaper leaves residents hungry for a trusted watchdog and worried about what stories won't be covered.

The decline of Salinas' 152-year-old newspaper has eroded the sense of community in this city renowned as the Salad Bowl of the World. Residents are left hungry for a trusted watchdog and worried about what stories are going uncovered.

Hundreds of millions of agricultural pesticides are sprayed on farm fields in California each year. Those pesticides affect the farm workers who labor in the fields and the communities nearby, where exposure is linked to increases in respiratory diseases, headaches, and even developmental disabilities. Most of the residents in those communities are people of color.