Richmondside’s audience engagement editor, Alejandra Armstrong, has been honored by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists with the Unsung Hero award for 2025. And our sister newsroom The Oaklandside took home an Excellence in Journalism award.
Armstrong, who joined Cityside in 2022, is responsible for ensuring that the journalism from Cityside’s four newsrooms — Richmondside, Berkeleyside, Oaklandside, and East Bay Nosh — is published with readers front of mind.
Long before a reporter begins reporting, Armstrong makes sure they have addressed the fundamental questions: Why are we doing this? Who is it for? How will it help them? What is the best way to convey this information?
Armstrong’s talents in optimizing Cityside’s journalism to best serve its diverse communities, and her expertise in search engine optimization, audience data analysis, social media, and newsletters, have helped build a large and highly engaged audience. More than 600,000 people visit Cityside’s sites every month, and our newsletters routinely achieve open rates that exceed 50% — with some as high as 60%-80%. Cityside’s social media accounts have more than 147,000 followers.
“The role of an audience editor in local news organizations is still relatively new, but with the right person in the position, one whose editorial judgements are as strong as their analytical skills, it can be transformational. This is something Alejandra demonstrates every day at Cityside,” said Tracey Taylor, Cityside’s co-founder and chief content officer.
“I’m honored to receive this award,” said Armstrong. “I really enjoy the work that I do at Cityside — working with incredible journalists and finding creative ways to distribute information to our communities. I especially like hearing from readers, taking their feedback and coming up with actionable responses. A lot of audience work is done behind the scenes, so being recognized by the SPJ board really means a lot.”
Richmondside’s sister newsroom The Oaklandside was also honored at SPJ NorCal’s 2025 Excellence in Journalism awards. The newsroom’s senior news editor, Darwin BondGraham, and its public safety reporter Roselyn Romero, were recognized for their September 2024 in-depth interview with then Alameda County District Attorney titled “Pamela Price wishes more people understood the job of district attorney.” The story was published on both The Oaklandside and Berkeleyside.
SPJ NorCal bestowed two Career Achievement Awards this year: one to Kevin Fagan, who recently retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, for his decades of award-winning, on-the-ground reporting about the realities of homelessness in the Bay Area; and the other to Monica Campbell, a longtime public radio reporter and editor who spent her career as an immigration reporter in the Bay Area and Latin America, and now leads the state-funded California Local News Fellowship program, based at UC Berkeley. (See all the 2025 winners.)
SPJ NorCal’s 40th annual “excellence in journalism” awards ceremony will be held Thursday evening at Bayview Opera House in San Francisco.
