GILROY
– Community news veteran Robert Airoldi has been named the new
City Editor of The Gilroy Dispatch.
Airoldi, 44, took over the post last week.
GILROY – Community news veteran Robert Airoldi has been named the new City Editor of The Gilroy Dispatch.
Airoldi, 44, took over the post last week.
Airoldi most recently worked as a reporter for The Argus, a sister newspaper of the Oakland Tribune in Fremont. He covered city politics, police and court beats for five years.
At the Argus, Airoldi won a Society of Professional Journalists Award for his coverage of the Rodney Blach “Fremont Bomber” trial. He also covered the high-profile Eddie ”Gwen” Araujo case in which a transgender youth was brutally killed by four young men.
“Robert’s an enthusiastic journalist with more than a decade of news experience who has a passion for good stories,” Dispatch Executive Editor Mark Derry said. “His news judgment and leadership skills will help raise the bar in story selection and reporting as we continue to improve our product.”
As City Editor at The Dispatch, the Morgan Hill resident and San Jose native will oversee daily operations of the newsroom, assigning and editing stories.
“I’m looking for a new challenge. I enjoy community journalism. I believe you can have more of an impact that way,” Airoldi said. “I really don’t want to be one of 75 or 100 reporters at a New York Times or Washington Post.”
This is Airoldi’s first editor’s position in his near 15 years of journalism. Before working for The Argus, Airoldi wrote for the Morgan Hill Times, a sister paper to The Dispatch. In Morgan Hill, he covered education and later city politics.
Although his editorial position at The Dispatch is a new experience, Airoldi is a veteran to publishing. After graduating from San Jose State University with a photojournalism degree, Airoldi launched his own newspaper, The Coastal Courier.
“The (Santa Cruz) Sentinel wasn’t covering Capitola. The (San Jose) Mercury wasn’t either. I couldn’t get information about anything that was going on locally,” said Airoldi, who lived in Capitola at the time. “I figured what the heck, I’ll start my own paper.”
Airoldi owned the Courier for five years. In that time, he brought it to a circulation of more than 10,000.
