Diversity Style Guide Editor Rachele Kanigal, Part 2

In this podcast, Rachele picks up where she left off in Part 1. Her heart broke when she moved from San Francisco to Oakland, but it made sense given her new job as a reporter at the Tri-Valley Times.

Oakland has changed a lot in Rachele's nearly 40 years there, but she came to love it nonetheless. The paper became the Contra Costa Times and her editors assigned Rachele to the medicine beat. She went to work for a paper in North Carolina for a few years, where she covered Duke and the University of North Carolina's medical schools. After that, it was back to California to work for the Oakland Tribune.

She had met and married her husband here, and he had traveled east and back with her. In 1995, with a one-year-old at home, she had the chance to teach a class in SF State's Journalism department, and she took it. Instantly, she loved it. It turned into a regular job (as a lecturer), while she was also working as a reporter and raising an infant.

She had another kid a few years later and decided to get her master's degree. That meant moving her family to New York City, because she got into Columbia's graduate journalism program. The family had just arrived when the 2001 attacks happened in lower Manhattan. Rachele shares what it was like to be in New York in the aftermath of 9/11.

After a brief detour at CSU Monterey Bay, Rachele landed back at SF State, in 2004. This time, she was on tenure track. This is where Rachele and Jeff's paths intersect, as he was in the journalism program at state from 2003–05. She was back right where she wanted to be, doing what she wanted to be doing. The legacy of activism at SF State played no small part in why Rachele felt at home there.

The Diversity Style Guide essentially came out of the Journalism Department's work (the Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism). The Center was losing funding for a variety of reasons. As interim chair of the Center, Rachele took an existing style guide that had been compiled from various sources and revitalized it from a PDF to a searchable website, as it exists today.

Most of Rachele's time as chair of the Journalism Department has been during COVID. She uses those experiences as a basis of talking about what it means to still be here—our show's theme this season.

If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen. And visit her website: Rachele Kanigal.

We recorded this podcast at Rachele's home in Oakland in January 2022.

Photography by Jeff Hunt