Jacob Simas

I am a program manager at Fusion Media Network. Previously, I was an editor at New America Media (NAM) - a non-profit news service and national collaboration of ethnic, youth and community media outlets - and the director of NAM's five California youth-led media hubs for community health reporting, located in the East Coachella Valley, Fresno, Long Beach, Richmond and South Kern County.

Spent a decade working in the field of community and youth development in San Francisco as a youth counselor and later as a director of after school arts-education programs serving immigrant youth and families in San Francisco’s Mission District. 

Media work began in 2003 as a graduate of the First Voice apprenticeship program at Pacifica flagship radio station KPFA in Berkeley.  Later obtained a formal education in journalism at UC Berkeley’s J-school, earning a Master’s degree with an emphasis on documentary film and was awarded the university prize for documentary excellence for the thesis film Inside Story, which chronicled the rise and fall of California’s prison newspapers over the decades and the recent rebirth of The San Quentin News, today the only remaining newspaper written by and for inmates within the walls of a California state prison.