Mission Local, the nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco's Mission District and beyond, has named Joe Rivano Barros as its new executive editor.

For a city where local journalism has been hollowed out over the past decade — RIP to countless newsrooms that couldn't survive the ad revenue collapse — leadership changes at the outlets still standing are worth paying attention to. Mission Local has carved out a niche as one of the more persistent voices covering neighborhood-level issues in SF, from housing battles to policing to the general chaos of city governance.

Rivano Barros takes the helm at a time when San Francisco arguably needs local journalism more than ever. City Hall continues to operate with the kind of budgetary opacity that would make a Pentagon auditor blush, and neighborhood-level accountability reporting is one of the few things keeping elected officials even marginally honest. Whether you agree with Mission Local's editorial slant on any given issue or not, having more editors-in-chief committed to covering what actually happens at Board of Supervisors meetings and in city departments is a net positive for the city.

The broader point here is simple: local news isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure. Study after study shows that when local newsrooms disappear, municipal borrowing costs go up, corruption increases, and voter engagement drops. That's not a left-right issue — that's a "do you want your tax dollars lit on fire with zero accountability" issue.

We don't always see eye to eye with every outlet in town, but we'll always root for more people doing the work of holding San Francisco's government to account. Congrats to Rivano Barros. Now get to work — there's no shortage of material in this city.