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Newsletters
Yap Zone: COYOTE's Cecilia Lei on Learning How To Ask for Help
It's really revelatory to feel so alone in your shame and guilt and then meet a community of people who also feel the same way.
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Hey there and welcome to the Yap Zone, our biweekly (that means every other week) newsletter where COYOTE gives you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our newsroom and a rundown of our team's picks for music, food, events, and lots more. This newsletter is an exclusive offering and extra dose of gratitude for our Yapper- and Howler-tier members. Thank you, and we hope you enjoy!
There are 11 of us on the COYOTE team, and each person has a journalistic specialty that adds so much to what we do. Some of us are passionate about tech or housing policy, while others are always keeping an eye on what's going on with Bay Area food.
While our work stands for itself, we've gotten to know each other very, very well over this past year. Each of us has interests and hyperfixations that we've never been able to channel through our public work. So we'll be sporadically using this newsletter to show those sides of us.
This week, we're highlighting Cecilia Lei, a reporter and producer, as well as an audio and live events host based in the East Bay. She covers immigration, the criminal legal system, AAPI issues, as well as other Bay Area communities. As a COYOTE worker-owner, she's written about protest safety and the work of a small pro-Palestine activist group in her hometown of Albany. We also made her write about Subway sandwiches.
Many of us in the local news scene consider Cecilia to be a journalism heavyweight; so when she admitted that she only just recently learned how to swim last year, it was a pleasant shock! So I called her up and asked her to share more about the experience: why swimming well is all about balance, her favorite stroke style, and her realization that being bad at stuff can be kind of fun.