Editorial Team

Steve Fainaru has 25 years of experience as a reporter, covering everything from the Boston Red Sox to the Iraq war. He worked 10 years at the Washington Post and received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2008 for his series on abuses involving private security contractors in Iraq. He is the author of two books: “The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba and the Search for the American Dream” and “Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq.”

Jeanne Carstensen comes to The Bay Citizen from Salon, where she was managing editor.  Previously, she was senior arts and features editor at SFGate.com, where she launched the site's first blogs. She was awarded a National Arts Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University in 2001.  Carstensen lived in Costa Rica for six years, reporting for the shortwave station Radio for Peace International.   She covered digital culture at the Whole Earth Review magazine and was the managing editor of the Esstional Whole Earth Catalog. Jeanne lives in Bernal Heights in San Francisco.

Queena comes to The Bay Citizen from 89.3-KPCC, Southern California’s leading NPR-affiliate, where she helped start-up its highly-successful arts and culture show Off-Ramp. Queena also co-produces a pop + tech program called CyberFrequencies, which continues to air on KPCC and Sirius/XM. A graduate of NYU and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Queena spent four years at the Wall Street Journal. Queena has written for various publications including the Los Angeles Times, Modesto Bee and the LA Weekly. Her radio stories have aired on the BBC Global Perspective Documentary Series, WNYC's Studio 360, KQED’s California Report and NPR's Day To Day.

Annette Fuentes, a native New Yorker, comes to The Bay Citizen from New America Media, where she was managing editor. A veteran news journalist, Fuentes was an editorial writer for El Diario/La Prensa, editor of City Limits magazine, metro editor at the Village Voice, a viewpoints editor at NY Newsday and health/hospitals reporter at the New York Daily News, where she won awards for her investigative stories. From 1998 to 2006, she taught news reporting and writing as an adjunct at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and freelanced for outlets including the New York Times, the Progressive and USA Today, where she is an op ed contributor. Fuentes is the author of the forthcoming book, “Lock Down High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House” (Verso), about public school security and safety.

Zoe Corneli was a founding staff member of the daily local news magazine Crosscurrents from KALW Public Radio, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. Her work there ranged from reporting and production to editing stories by both staff and student reporters. She also managed the development of the program’s companion digital news magazine, KALWNews.org. In 2009, Zoe was named “Outstanding Emerging Journalist” by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Her national reporting credits include NPR News, PRI's The World, and The Takeaway. Zoe moved to San Francisco from New York in 2005. Her journalism career began at New York University’s student radio station, WNYU, where she served as news director. She also wrote for NYU’s student newspaper and completed internships at NPR member station WNYC.

An East Coast transplant, Reyhan Harmanci moved to San Francisco in 2001. She worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for seven years, first as an editorial assistant and then as a reporter, covering arts and culture trends — from pet detectives to Snuggies to street art, and beyond. After taking a buyout from the Chronicle in April 2009, she has freelanced for SF Weekly, California magazine, McSweeney's, the Village Voice, Style.com, etc. and worked as an editor/producer at The Bold Italic, a Gannett-owned online publication.

Senior writer Elizabeth Lesly Stevens writes primarily about business and finance. A recent transplant to San Francisco, she spent many years in New York as an editor and writer at Business Week, a media-business columnist at New York magazine, an editor at Talk magazine, and executive editor at Brill’s Content. Elizabeth graduated from the University of California at Davis (B.A.) and Northwestern University (M.S.).

Katharine Mieszkowski is covering health and science for The Bay Citizen. Previously, she was a contributor to the New York Times Bay Area section and blog. Katharine has also been a senior writer for Salon.com and Fast Company. A graduate of Yale, her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, MS, Glamour, Reader's Digest, Slate and San Francisco.

Zusha Elinson covers Environment, Land Use and Transportation at The Bay Citizen. Elinson got his start at the Oakland Post, an African American weekly paper where he reported on politics, education, community and development. Then it was across the Bay to Marin where he wrote about city government, crime, environmental issues and yacht parades for the Marinscope. Most recently, he was a staff writer at the Recorder where he covered Silicon Valley, writing about the tenuous relationship between big tech companies and the law. At the Recorder, he won a California Newspaper Publishers Association award for business reporting.

Gerry Shih is the Bay Citizen's new reporter for education and social issues. He was previously a reporter at the New York Times, where he wrote for the business section before moving to San Francisco to help launch the paper's Bay Area pages in late 2009. He has a B.A. in economics from Stanford University.

Before The Bay Citizen, Shoshana wrote breaking crime news and enterprise stories for The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., garnering a Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and a gold medal for public service from the Florida Society of News Editors. Originally from northern New Jersey, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in American Studies in 2007.

Bay Citizen reporting intern Kate McLean is in her second year at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Along with two colleagues, she received the Randy Shilts Memorial Award for Exceptional Reporting and the Award for Excellence in New Media or Reporting on Technology. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked in documentary television, most recently as associate producer for a primetime PBS adaptation of "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan.

Richard Parks has a degree from McGill University in Montreal and is currently a student in the documentary film program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. He is the recipient of the 2010 Randy Shilts Memorial Award for Exceptional Reporting and the 2010 Wired Award for Excellence in New Media Reporting on Technology. The former editor of two newspapers, Parks was also associate producer for a Emmy-nominated documentary film aired on PBS, The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Salon, and many other print and online publications.