Los Altos High School alumni Tomoki Chien and Gil Rubinstein are no strangers to the Los Altos journalism scene. (They’re actually the ones who founded the Post.) More than three years later, the two are back in their hometown to promote their new project, College Brief: an organization aimed toward making news more accessible for not Midpeninsula-based teenagers, but college students state-wide.
At a fundraising event on Saturday, the two presented College Brief and its purpose to Los Altos community members. Co-hosted by Los Altos Mayor Jonathan Weinberg and City Councilmember Sally Meadows, with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo as a focal speaker, it’s safe to say that Chien and Rubinstein pulled out all the stops.
“College students just don’t read the news,” Chien said at the event. “95 percent of young people have absolutely no idea what’s happening around them.”
College Brief, which was officially founded in October, is based on a model that Chien had been perfecting for over a year. Two weeks after he arrived for his freshman year at the University of Southern California, he noticed something: USC student journalists were very “self congratulatory” about their work — but no one was actually reading the stories they’d write, much less the local papers.
So, not even two months into his freshman year, he independently started writing “Morning, Trojan” out of his dorm room, which was a newsletter that summarized relevant local and state-wide news in a daily email for USC students.
“[‘Morning, Trojan’] had all this local news in one place,” Chien said. “The promise was, ‘Give me two minutes of your time, and boom. You’re done. You’ve had your vitamins for the day.’”
With its quippy tone and appealingly brief format, the newsletter accumulated 500 subscribers in one year. After evaluating its unprecedentedly high click and open rates, Chien knew it was time to expand the project. Today, College Brief — built on the basis of “Morning, Trojan” — serves students at USC, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Berkeley.
What makes College Brief stand out is how readable and low-commitment it is, Chien said, acting as sort of a journalistic “baby step” for college students. For example, when the Daily Trojan reported that the USC tuition is set to rise by nearly 5%, Chien wrote a newsletter listing items one could buy with that $3,264, with a snarky headline of, “Good news! Your tuition is $3,000 higher.” The list included an 83-inch smart TV, a Prada handbag, three MacBook Airs and a five-day Hawaiian luxury vacation, among other items.
But, the central purpose of College Brief isn’t just to get students to read the news, Rubinstein said. It’s also to aid students in building vital news-reading habits that will last them for the rest of their lives.
“College is sort of the time where you build habits,” Rubinstein said. “You might figure out who you want to be in the world … maybe you start going to the gym every day. You [should] read the news every day too. We’re trying to add that habit into students’ routines.”
Eshoo, who Rubinstein worked for during her 2022 campaign, said that “everything needs to be microwavable” in today’s age, noting her lack of surprise at young people not being excited about consuming local news. But College Brief, she said, could be the missing piece, hopefully “striking a match” and giving college students the motivation to be informed and to vote.
“There is a crisis in American local news today,” Rubinstein said. “Americans do not want to read local news. People are not informed about [local] elections, and we think they should be. … We are trying to chip away at the underlying issues facing the American democracy today.”
If you’re looking to learn more about College Brief or donate, visit collegebrief.org.
