Since its inception in September 2021, the Vallejo Sun has been on the forefront of providing high-quality, accurate, and timely content, helping to keep the Vallejo and Benicia communities informed.

The Vallejo Sun was founded by regional journalists Scott Morris, Brian Krans, and John Glidden as a way to stave off a growing news desert in the city of Vallejo.

It was built on the foundation laid by Glidden, who founded JohnGlidden.com in August 2020 following his departure from the Vallejo Times-Herald newspaper in July 2020. The Sun launched by incorporating previous work by Glidden, Morris and Krans where possible to provide a single resource for recent area history at its launch.

Since then, the Sun has produced 417 unique articles, according to an informal audit conducted by the Sun as of December 2022. The audit included the Vallejo Sun’s first year of operations plus three and a half months following its launch on Sept. 15, 2021. It found that May 2022 was the most productive month for the Sun, with 35 articles published. On average, the Sun publishes about 25 articles per month.

The Sun also analyzed some of the impact of those articles to help demonstrate its contributions to the Vallejo and regional community.

The Sun’s 417 articles include eight informative podcast episodes produced by Krans, who serves as the Vallejo Sun’s primary editor and special projects manager. The podcasts have investigated various topics, including how the practice of badge-bending became a ritual among Vallejo Police, and giving a voice to Cherie Nicoletta, a woman who died during the city of Vallejo’s Project RoomKey program. Project RoomKey was aimed at providing lodging for the city’s homeless amid the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent Vallejo Sun articles found a program beset with issues.

Those two episodes, plus written reports on those subjects, earned the Vallejo Sun its first two journalism awards. The Project RoomKey coverage won the best investigative reporting award from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the badge bending coverage won the best ongoing coverage award from the same organization. The Project RoomKey coverage was also a finalist for the Local Independent Online News (LION) outstanding coverage award.

Both of those stories have repeatedly been brought up by community members, including in city council meetings. The city initially refused to acknowledge the Sun’s reporting on its Project RoomKey program, but eventually city staff gave a presentation to the city council on the program and revealed that more people died than previously known.

The Sun has since won three more awards from the San Francisco Press Club for investigative reporting, ongoing coverage and best news story. The Sun’s staff takes particular pride in the ongoing coverage awards, as they show a commitment to following up on important stories.

Glidden, the Sun’s government reporter, has written 269 articles on topics such as the Vallejo City Council, the Vallejo City Unified School District Board of Education, and the city’s police force. Glidden has kept close  track of the arrivals and departures of senior-level employees at city hall, the status of litigation affecting the city of Vallejo, and local elections.

Glidden and Morris spearheaded the Sun’s election coverage for 2022, contributing a combined 64 articles for the June primary (17) and the November general (47) elections. For both elections, the Sun dedicated a portion of its website into a “one-stop shop” for local voters to learn about the candidates seeking elected office in Vallejo, Benicia and Solano County. Articles included candidate profiles, information on how much money candidates raised and spent, where to vote, and coverage of candidate forums.

Morris serves as the Vallejo Sun’s public records request specialist.  In September, he worked with attorney Sam Ferguson to file a petition in Solano County Superior Court against the city of Fairfield. The suit resulted in a settlement which required the Fairfield Police Department to release body-camera footage from a June 2022 police shooting in Vallejo. Fairfield initially refused to release the footage because of an ongoing criminal prosecution in the case.

The Sun’s public records reporting also spurred Vallejo Mayor Robert McConnell to ask for an investigation into the “inadvertent” destruction of records in five police shooting investigations with the apparent approval of the city attorney’s office. The Sun first revealed the records had been destroyed after its public records requests for the material were denied.

Morris is the preeminent authority on Three Percenter activities in the region. Prior to the launch of the Sun, he broke the story of Solano County sheriff deputies who showed support for the group, which is identified by the FBI as an anti-government extremist group and falsely believes that only three percent of the American colonists fought in the Revolutionary War. Three Percenters have been implicated in violent plots across the country.

Morris’s reporting on the Three Percenters was mentioned in a lawsuit against the Solano County Sheriff’s Office for the beating of a Black woman during a traffic stop near Dixon. The suit alleged that one of the sheriff’s employees named in Morris’s reporting, Sgt. Roy Stockton, had supervised the two deputies who dragged the woman away from her car and hit her until she was unconscious after she was stopped for mismatched license plates.

The Sun also showed that the sheriff’s office ended a contract with Solano Community College after the college requested a response to the deputies displaying Three Percenter symbols. The Solano County Board of Supervisors considered enacting oversight of the sheriff’s office following the Three Percenter revelations, the Dixon incident, and other issues in the sheriff’s office.

Morris won a first place prize in investigative reporting from the San Francisco Press Club for his first story for the Sun, which exposed Three Percenter ties to a defunct gun club near Fairfield. He later reported on the missed opportunities by law enforcement to catch Ian Rogers, who had amassed an arsenal of 50 guns and later pleaded guilty to plotting to bomb the Democrats’ Sacramento headquarters. The Sun also published a podcast episode written by Morris detailing the history of Three Percenters in the region.

Morris also oversees the business side of Vallejo Sun LLC. The Sun is mainly reliant on subscription revenue and reader support. Its weekly newsletter has thousands of subscribers. The Sun has also received financial support from LION and the Google News Initiative News Equity Fund. It earns some additional revenue through advertising and content licensing, including a photo and audio to Vice News for its recent documentary on the Vallejo Police Department.

On its first anniversary, the Sun launched an arts and entertainment section and brought on its first freelance contributors. The Sun has published 10 freelance articles, including a profile on the city of Vallejo’s monthly downtown Art Walk and an article about the impact a driver shortage is having on the local bus service. The Sun formed a partnership with Vallejo Arts & Entertainment to share listings and advertisements. That site’s editor, Gretchen Zimmermann, is the Sun’s primary arts contributor. The Sun aims to further expand the role of freelance contributors and its arts and events coverage in the coming year.

The Sun is hosted on Ghost, a nonprofit publishing platform, and receives technical support from Outpost, a California cooperative venture to support independent publishing.

Thank you for your interest in the Sun and we look forward to providing you with important community journalism in the year to come.