The Sacramento Bee hires two distinguished journalists to join its editorial board
The Sacramento Bee’s opinion team is growing. I’m thrilled and hopeful about what it will mean for our readers and the broader Sacramento region.
We have hired two distinguished and talented journalists who we expect will make significant contributions to our pages at such an urgent time for Sacramento and California. Our new teammates are both California natives, and they join us this week, at the very moment California voters decide the fate of Gov. Gavin Newsom in this contentious recall election.
Josh Gohlke, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Stanford University, becomes our new deputy opinion editor.
Robin Epley, a Sacramento native who grew up in the Foothill Farms neighborhood and graduated from Chico State University, will join us as an opinion writer.
“I’m thrilled we’re adding two strong voices in Josh and Robin to The Bee,” said Peter St. Onge, National Opinion Editor for McClatchy. “Marcos and his team have been providing powerful local opinion journalism to Bee readers. Robin and Josh are going to make a great team even better.”
Both Gohlke and Epley have made names for themselves as writers and as editors. They have built laudable careers by developing interesting voices, and by being thinkers and doers. Both are smart but not smug. They are curious. They care about their state, their country and their world. Despite taking vastly different paths, both have dedicated their professional lives to journalism, and their journalism will make our opinion pages better.
Gohlke, 46, was most recently the deputy editorial page editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he led the opinion coverage of state and national elections, COVID-19 and California’s housing crisis.
In 2017, the California Newspaper Publishers Association awarded Gohlke and a colleague a first-place award for editorial writing. The subject was San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis.
Gohlke is a 25-year newspaper veteran. He served as the deputy editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J. Before that, Gohlke began his career as an editor and a writer — first at the Kern Valley Sun in Lake Isabella and then at the Merced Sun-Star.
Our readers will benefit from his vast experience editorializing on state and national topics, and gain a thoughtful, nuanced and smart perspective on how politics shape their everyday lives.
“I’m honored to become part of an organization with such a long, proud tradition of watchdog coverage, as well as a strong, continuing commitment to opinion journalism,” Gohlke said. “The Bee and McClatchy have a formidable team that I’m excited to join.”
Epley, 31, was most recently the editor of the Fort Bragg Advocate-News and the Mendocino Beacon, providing vital information to North Coast communities during the worst days of the pandemic. To her credit, she was the only full-time staffer for both papers. Epley managed the budgets of both papers, designed and approved the content and layouts of all the news pages — along with reporting the news and taking photographs.
In her farewell column to her North Coast readers last month, Epley appealed to readers to support their local papers or risk losing them.
She hadn’t even started here yet, and we were already proud of her.
Before her last assignment, Epley was a staff reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record. While there, Epley was part of a team of journalists who were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the deadly 2018 Camp Fire.
The values and commitment Epley brings to her work should energize Sacramento readers.
“As a journalist, I am always honored to serve my community, but as a born-and-raised Sacramentan, I am extremely excited to be home again and writing for The Sacramento Bee,” Epley said. “I feel very lucky that my hometown paper is both so prestigious and so near to family and friends.”
Bee editorial board grows
With the additions of these two accomplished journalists, The Bee’s opinion team now has six full-time members for the first time in years. Gohlke and Epley join me, assistant opinion editor Yousef Baig, opinion assistant Hannah Holzer and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jack Ohman.
A national figure in journalism and hugely popular with Bee readers, Ohman will transition to Senior Associate Editor. Ohman will continue being the best editorial cartoonist in America (in our opinion), and he will continue writing thoughtful, funny and biting columns infused with his humanity.
As the California opinion editor for The Bee, I’m proud to say that the investment in our team by McClatchy is a cause for celebration. It’s also a big responsibility.
Over the years, I have attended far too many farewell gatherings for departing colleagues. Saying hello and welcome is so much more satisfying and hopeful.
The aim now is for our readers to see and feel the difference through the editorials and columns our enhanced team produces in the weeks and months to come.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Josh Gohlke and Robin Epley to The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board,” said Colleen McCain Nelson, executive editor of The Bee and California regional editor for McClatchy.
“Robin and Josh will play an integral role in helping The Bee Editorial Board deliver timely, reported commentary to our readers while leading a community conversation about the most pertinent issues in Sacramento. They’re joining a talented and ambitious team that will ensure that The Bee’s opinion journalism is an essential read every day.”
All of us in Sacramento are part of a larger collection of California opinion writers who make up one California opinion team for McClatchy. You will see the work of Garth Stapley, Stephanie Finucane and Tad Weber — our colleagues in Modesto, San Luis Obispo and Fresno, respectively — in our Sacramento Bee opinion pages often. Our work will appear in theirs.
Along with Nelson, our California opinion team is now 10 members strong. On statewide issues, our footprint is large and covers a significant swath of California.
Community advisory board
In addition, The Sacramento Bee will soon announce the creation of a Community Advisory Board. The board will be composed of community members who will reflect a diversity of perspectives, including ideological, in our community. They will help us, advise us, hold us accountable and push us to be better.
Josh Gohlke and Robin Epley will also make us better. Gohlke will bring readers another dimension of reporting and opinion journalism from the state Capitol. Epley will lean on a wealth of experiences in California journalism and the working-class neighborhood in Sacramento where she was raised. She has a unique presence on social media.
Epley will also be one of three Sacramento Bee opinion writers under the age of 32, along with Baig and Holzer. For them, climate change and affordable housing are not abstractions. They are living the experiences of young people in our region and state, and those perspectives will inform their work and our readers.
Our editorial board will be focused on local and state issues that resonate with our readers in the Sacramento region. We know you can find national commentary via other sources, so we will strive to produce editorials and columns about our community and our state that are reported by opinion journalists in Sacramento and at our sister papers throughout the state.
These are difficult, challenging times for all of us. As opinion writers and editors, we have a lot of hard work ahead of us to earn your trust, your business and your time.That’s what all of us here aim to do.
This story was originally published September 12, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
