In an era when many local newsrooms are shrinking and shuttering, Voice of OC has become a rare incubator for accountability journalism in Orange County — training young reporters, exposing government wrongdoings and shaping a generation of watchdog journalists who now lead investigations across California and beyond.
“Voice occupies a special place in the Orange County news landscape, where there is such a contraction overall in the amount of accountability journalism being done, and even just journalism at all covering city halls and the county government. And Voice, it is really a beacon of doing important accountability work,” said Nick Gerda, who worked with Voice for over a decade covering county government, starting at the newsroom as an intern in 2011.
Gerda, a watchdog correspondent at LAist, was named Journalist of the Year by both the OC and LA press clubs this summer for his investigative work uncovering how former OC Supervisor Andrew Do had quietly awarded more than $13 million in public funds dedicated to seniors in need during the pandemic to a nonprofit without disclosing that his daughter worked as a leader there.
Former Voice of OC reporters say the newsroom’s focus on accountability has had a direct impact on communities across the county.
“In a short period of time, I saw how effective journalism is and how it very quickly gave people insight into their community, even people who considered themselves to be actively involved in local government,” said Thy Vo of her time as a government reporter covering the cities of Garden Grove and Westminster at Voice of OC . “It was a bird’s eye view into a very fundamental and obvious kind of work, and it quickly translated into people being able to take action.”
Vo, an investigative editor at Investigate West, started as an intern in the Voice newsroom as a student at Haverford College and was later hired full-time in 2014.
Like Vo, other former staff credit the newsroom with teaching them about government operations, how to understand public records and other investigative skills that fuel local accountability reporting.
“I basically grew up as an investigator and researcher at Voice,” said Adam Elmahrek, who joined the newsroom in 2010.
“I got all of my training and tools there, basically, such as how to understand documents, how to request public records, how to conduct interviews, how to be thoughtful about the issue at hand by exploring all the various angles of sort of whatever question you’re grappling with, whether that’s a public policy question, or just kind of the nuts and bolts of the analysis and investigating that I do now, I really honed when I was at Voice of OC,” said Elmahrek, who during his tenure at the LA Times was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and Selden Ring awards for team investigations on cannabis legalization.
Elmahrek launched an investigative firm this summer – AE Research LLC – specializing in securities class actions, business intelligence, corporate due diligence and litigation support after his departure from the Los Angeles Times.
“Local politics and politics in general, it’s a lot about money and power and much less about doing the right thing and that’s really unfortunate, but it’s part of his human nature, part of it is the system we live in,” Elmahrek said of how his six years with Voice of OC and years of investigative work at the LA Times shifted his perspective.
“But that’s why it’s so important to have strong local accountability beat reporting, because if those are the forces that are moving politics along, that’s a big problem for society, for democracy.”
“Voice of OC has become a non-negotiable part of Orange County’s civic discourse engagement,” said San José Spotlight government and politics reporter Brandon Pho.
“Working for someone like Norberto, who, you know, knows a lot, who really pushes you to be not only at your best, but at your most aggressive and hard hitting to challenge public officials and to not be afraid of any kind of retaliation or chilling effects that could come on you as a result, it’s like you have an obligation to tell the truth right now, and you should tell the truth.”
Like several current and former Voice reporters, who started as interns with the newsroom while attending Cal State Fullerton in 2018. Pho joined the newsroom full-time in 2020 as the Voice of OC’s first Report for America fellow covering North and Central Orange County.
“Voice of OC is an incubator for young journalists, for emerging journalists, for student journalists and the way they demonstrate that is when young reporters who are coming into this industry with fresh eyes, have interesting ideas, or they want to experiment, either visually with multimedia or with writing. Voice of OC not only accepts that, but encourages that. They let the reporters experiment.”
The newsroom’s partnerships with local universities have allowed students to gain storytelling skills while fueling critical local reporting in Orange County, where a news desert continues to grow.
“What I really learned at Voice of OC was the importance of an individual’s story and informing community members on how different governmental or environmental things are affecting them without them knowing, and I feel like I still carry that today,” said Vivienne Ayers, a Chapman University graduate and former a student reporter in the Collegiate News Service.
Ayers currently works as a social assistant for Reese’s Book Club, a reading community founded by actress Reese Witherspoon under her media company, Hello Sunshine. She has won state and local awards for her student reporting on the fallout from the Tustin Hanger Fire – taking home first place for environmental reporting at the California Journalism Awards in 2024 alongside student journalist Sara Bass and Voice of OC reporter Noah Biesiada.
“Even though I’m in more of a marketing and editorial role right now, there’s still a high stress on everything being accurate, especially because once it’s online, it’s always out there,” she said.
Students and emerging journalists – like Melanie Nguyen, who worked as a fellow in 2023 after her graduation from Cal State Fullerton that year – gain newsgathering skills while receiving mentorship on sourcing, interviewing and requesting public records.
“I learned a lot about just the way that I collect news. I was transitioning from college to real-life journalism, and it pushed me to think more critically. The stories I worked on actually had a wider impact, and it was different than where I was before working for the school newspaper at the Daily Titan,” said Nguyen, a business reporter at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
“There were just a lot more questions every time I wrote something, the editing process was a lot more intensive and diligent,” she said. “It really challenged me to think of stories in a different way.”
To be considered for a news internship or reporting fellowship, reach out to admin@voiceofoc.org. To support these kinds of journalism training efforts, donate here.
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