About
The AggreGater exists to surface impactful journalism produced by San Francisco State alumni. The AggreGater gathers it, amplifies it, and preserves it against slow but steady digital erosion.
Why this exists
A journalist’s clips are their life’s work — and they scatter and crumble away over time. Outlets launch and fail, paywalls rise, links rot, the work of whole newsrooms sometimes gone forever. Years of careful, consequential, impactful work can disappear silently from the open web.
The AggreGater collects the published work of San Francisco State Journalism alumni into a single, durable home: a record of who we are, where our work has run, and the difference it has made. The AggreGater is a celebration, an archive, and an amplifier — built for the people who built it.
The program
Journalism has been a part of the curriculum and culture at San Francisco State for more than a century — led by more than a hundred years of student-led publications and a department that has helped students grow into professional journalists of all types and media.
1922
Campus journalism takes root with The Vigilante — the first in a lineage that runs through The Bay Leaf (1928) and The Golden Gater (1931).
Early 1930s
Journalism, first taught within the English Department, becomes an independent academic unit of its own.
1960
The program is formally established as the Department of Journalism.
1968
In the late 1960s, racially insensitive coverage and opinion in The Golden Gater inflamed campus tensions, particularly with the Black Student Union — tensions that culminated in the historic 1968 strike, and in a painful but pivotal reckoning the department chose to carry forward rather than bury.
After 1968
Over the following decades, faculty leaders including Betty Medsger, Erna Smith, and Jon Funabiki reshape the program around racial equity, ethical journalism, press freedom, and community-based reporting.
Through ACEJMC accreditation and a hands-on, newsroom-first curriculum, the program’s through-line has held: rigor, cultural inclusivity, and journalism in service of social justice.
How it’s built
The AggreGater is built like a small, modern newsroom product — thoughtfully, and almost entirely in the open. A quick tour of what’s under the hood:
The whole thing — the public site and the editorial back-office behind it — is one modern web application.
An open-source newsroom runs inside the app, where stories, profiles, and first-person reflections are curated.
The system of record for every graduate, article, and reflection.
Media and permanent article snapshots, stored to outlast link-rot and the occasional disappearing newsroom.
A date-seeded layout engine arranges the front page like a magazine — the same handcrafted edition for everyone, all day long.
An interactive 3D map places graduates in the newsrooms where they work, around the world.
What we believe
“We point to the work — never away from it.”
The AggreGater never republishes anyone’s reporting. Every story you find here links straight to the original article, on the publisher’s own site. We excerpt, we credit, and we send the click — and the traffic — back to the newsroom that did the work.
The only full copy we keep is a private archive, made purely as insurance against link-rot. It is never the version we show you, because preserving a body of work and competing with the outlets that published it are opposite things. Amplifying journalism means driving readers toward it, never away.
Built by hand
The AggreGater was built by Jesse Garnier — an SF State Journalism alumnus and Associate Professor who has spent nearly four decades in the department. He extended 30 years of experience as a journalist, developer, and designer with coding assistance from Claude Opus and Fable to keep our communities connected and our clips from vanishing. What a journey it’s been.
It is no one’s job and no one’s assignment. From the first prototype in September 2025 to the first GitHub commit in January 2026, The AggreGater has grown to more than 90,000 lines of TypeScript across 532 files — written on evenings and weekends by one inspired human and a patient AI assistant.
Independent
The AggreGater exists solely to surface the impact of the journalism produced by SF State Journalism. It is itself the work of an alumnus — Associate Professor Jesse Garnier — and it runs on one faculty member’s own time, his own server, and development costs of around $20 a month.
It is independent by necessity as much as by principle. That independence is what keeps it free to serve the work, and the people in it, and no one else.
The AggreGater is an independent project by SF State Journalism alumni. It is not owned, operated, sponsored, or endorsed by San Francisco State University or its Journalism Department.
Questions, corrections, or takedown requests: jesse@jlabsf.org
Keep it running
If the AggreGater has shown you something worth keeping, you can help keep it online. Every contribution goes straight to the cost of running the site — nothing more.
The AggreGater runs on roughly $20 a month — server hosting, plus the development tools that helped build it (yes, including the AI).
1988
Under photojournalism professor Ken Kobre, the student-produced special edition wins the Robert F. Kennedy Award — the only time student work from any UC or CSU campus has been so honored.
2000
The modern student newsroom takes shape with Golden Gate Xpress and Xpress Magazine, both still published today.
2015
Deep ties to local media endure: the San Francisco Chronicle dedicates an annual internship to an SF State photojournalism student, and KQED creates the Raul Ramirez Diversity in Journalism Internship for a Journalism major.
Since 2021
Students earn ten individual Top 10 honors in the Hearst Journalism Awards — the “College Pulitzers” — with the program named third-place Multimedia Intercollegiate Winner in 2021.
2022
An innovative Bilingual Spanish Journalism degree launches, extending a long commitment to serving the Bay Area’s communities in their own languages.
Byline-verified feeds and a corroboration-gated discovery engine find alumni work without ever inventing a false match.