Vanessa Ochavillo

Vanessa is a Bay Area-based reporter, currently working at the Half Moon Bay Review where she covers government, public safety and business.

Broadly, she is a writer, reporter and researcher excited by the many ways of conveying information that empowers us to make critical decisions. She was brought up, first, as a print journalist then dabbled in social science research and university communications before returning to journalism.

She is versed in reporting for audio, print and video. Nothing beats the human voice, which led her to produced the Review’s first-ever audio stories for its website.

Prior to covering the area in and around Half Moon Bay, her favorite stories have focused on the Bay Area Peninsula’s workforce, including the state of the building trades and maintenance workers’ concerns early in the pandemic.

Her work has appeared in the Mercury News, KQED, the Peninsula Press, the Sacramento Bee, the Guam Pacific Daily News and, of course, the Half Moon Bay Review.

Sample Work:

New device buoys fishing fleet (Dec. 2020, Coastside Magazine)

Personal protective equipment rally sanitation workers, janitors(May 4, 2020, Peninsula Press)

A worker throws out a lifeline for others who have experienced wage theft

Restaurants accused of wage theft to be outed in Santa Clara County (Dec. 26, 2019, San Jose Mercury News)

Apprenticeships expand, struggle to make up years of dried-up pipeline (Nov. 22, 2019, Peninsula Press)

San Jose’s Chicano murals will be added to city’s inventory of historic sites (Oct. 16, 2019, Peninsula Press)