{"id":372919,"date":"2026-06-24T11:54:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/372919\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:54:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:54:52","slug":"juan-gonzales-the-wise-owl-of-s-f-journalism-is-retiring-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/372919\/","title":{"rendered":"Juan Gonzales, the wise owl of S.F. journalism, is retiring. Sort of."},"content":{"rendered":"

Even at Juan Gonzales\u2019 retirement party, the 79-year-old journalist and mentor couldn\u2019t help but offer some tough love. He put his arm around a student, who was smiling bashfully, and gave him a nudge along with some basic words of encouragement \u2014 you\u2019ve got a good conscience, you\u2019re a good reporter, we just need to sharpen your skills.<\/p>\n

At the end of this month, Gonzales will officially retire from his post as chair of City College of San Francisco\u2019s journalism department, which he\u2019s held since 1985. The student at his retirement party June 6 was one of dozens of Gonzales\u2019 colleagues and mentees who came to celebrate him at Acci\u00f3n Latina \u2014 the nonprofit which houses the bilingual newspaper he founded in 1970, El Tecolote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to give other folks younger than me a chance to run the department,\u201d Gonzales said of his retirement from City College, \u201cmaybe even take it another notch up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mission<\/p>\n

Want the latest on the Mission and San Francisco? Sign up for our free daily newsletter below.<\/p>\n

Gonzales\u2019 students have gone on to work at news desks across San Francisco, across the state, and across the country. Others have gone on to found their own neighborhood papers: the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon<\/a> on the Westside came out of his tutelage, as did the Ingleside Light.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need journalists to speak truth to power,\u201d Gonzales said of his work.<\/p>\n

One of Gonzales\u2019 mentees, Santiago Mejia, was taking science classes at City College when a student in one of his classes announced that The Guardsman, City College\u2019s student newspaper, was looking for contributors. Mejia ended up working there for four years.<\/p>\n

Today, Mejia is a staff photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been for nearly 10 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a Latino man, I had someone to look up to,\u201d Mejia said.<\/p>\n

Gonzales pushed Mejia to apply to the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and wrote him a letter of recommendation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cJuan found me,\u201d Mejia said. \u201cHe saw things in me that no one else could.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s retiring today, but he\u2019s still fighting the fight tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another mentee of Gonzales\u2019, Mission Local\u2019s Eleni Balakrishnan, remembers the responsibility he gave her as editor-in-chief of The Guardsman. \u201cHe gave me the green light to call the shots,\u201d Balakrishnan said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gonzales learned how to call the shots \u2014 and delegate the shot calling \u2014 early. In 1970, at the age of\u00a022, he was asked to develop a course for San Francisco State University\u2019s new, first-of-its-kind ethnic studies program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gonzales was fresh out of San Francisco State\u2019s journalism program, and had\u00a0a couple of internships under his belt (one at the Associated Press, another at United Press International). He decided to teach a journalism class.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Out of that class, Mission-based newspaper El Tecolote<\/a> was born. At the time, Gonzales said, the lack of news coverage in the Mission District was glaring.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw the information needs of the people in that community,\u201d Gonzales said. \u201cAnd so I started a newspaper.\u201d <\/p>\n

Gonzales went on to get a masters degree at Stanford University, and then returned to teaching again, this time at City College, which had given him an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse: tenure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Photo by Andrew Brobst courtesy of Acci\u00f3n Latina.<\/p>\n

The Guardsman and its student reporters regularly win awards. In 2025, Gonzales was recognized for his teaching with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t think about those things until people bring them up,\u201d Gonzales said. \u201cYou\u2019re doing it for the love of the craft, and the love of working with students, working with anyone who wants to be a journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Gonzales says his stepping down as department chair will free up valuable time to continue mentoring young journalists, and to get more involved with El Tecolote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile I can still think and talk and have the physical abilities to do so, I want to be as helpful as possible to help the next generation of journalists,\u201d Gonzales said.<\/p>\n

Gonzales\u2019 own history \u2014 the way he tells it \u2014 is filled with moments to suggest that he was bound to be a newspaperman: In grade school, he used a printing-press toy to make his own newspaper sheets he called the Lafayette Times (\u201cbecause I lived on Lafayette Street, in Stockton\u201d). Later, in junior high, he contributed and made art for his school\u2019s literary magazine.<\/p>\n

But it was when Gonzales was a senior in high school that an advisor submitted one of his stories for an award from the San Francisco Press Club. Gonzales received an honorable mention. That, he said, set him on the path to seek a career in news.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018My God, somebody in the professional world thinks I have some talent.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We won’t ignore your neighborhood<\/p>\n

When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local reporter, it means someone is there. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.<\/p>\n

Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That’s what Mission Local is building. Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.<\/p>\n

So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even at Juan Gonzales\u2019 retirement party, the 79-year-old journalist and mentor couldn\u2019t help but offer some tough love.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[75771,1556,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-372919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-el-tecolote","tag-mission","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}