Jon Healey has worked at newspapers across the country. He started at a small New Jersey newspaper “that collapsed underneath” him, and continued on to a North Carolina paper that “had a Washington bureau in those days, the salad days.” He landed at the San Jose Mercury News during the dot-com boom, where he first met the man he interviewed for Zócalo, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org. Finally, “after a couple years of pleading,” Healey ended up at the Los Angeles Times.

Douglas McGray may be a savvy San Franciscan writer now, covering politics, science, tech and culture as a New America Foundation fellow, but he originally hails from “off in the woods” in Maine. Now settled in Noe Valley after moving to California four years ago, he says, “I’m never going back.”