At a time when East Bay media outlets are contracting, we’re growing and welcome Robert Gammon to the staff.

Compelling, local narrative storytelling that makes a difference. That’s the essential mission here at Telegraph Media, although it comes at a time when our East Bay media peers are shrinking dramatically, disappearing altogether, or paying substantially less attention to the East Bay—except, of course, for crime.

But we’re bucking that trend and growing. This issue, in fact, marks a serious doubling-down to improve the narrative and newsy nature of our content. We recently added an impressive senior editor, Robert Gammon, a longtime investigative journalist who knows his way through the courts, council chambers, and compromises of the East Bay. Serving as our region’s premier community watchdog since perhaps 1998, Bob has had a successful career reporting for Hayward’s Daily Review, the Oakland Tribune, and the East Bay Express, ultimately rising to helm that weekly newspaper as editor.

We’re glad to welcome him to Telegraph Media, where his reporting and editing will grace the pages of Oakland and Alameda magazines, as well as The East Bay Monthly. But his arrival doesn’t signal an abandonment of our initial franchise—lifestyle and service-oriented journalism dedicated to sharing the things about the East Bay that make our communities so riveting. Bob’s arrival merely provides us the depth and rigor necessary for our publications to provide the type of in-depth journalism that other news outlets once provided. His challenge is to steer our publications into the deeper and headier waters of in-depth news reporting and long-form journalism.

Bob already has retooled our blog, formerly the sole province of Anneli Rufus, another integral and awesome contributor to this magazine she continues to write and edit, primarily about food and travel, for our publications. The dining blog once known as Feast Bay is now a general interest blog known as East Bay 365 (EastBay365 also happens to be the Oakland Magazine Twitter handle; Alameda’s is Alameda365). Bob is blogging even as I write this, banging on his keyboard and rustling newspapers while crunching on a nest of raw carrots as he highlights the must-read stories of the day and breaks news that would otherwise go unreported.