Camillia Lanham has been the editor of the Sun and New Times since 2015. She started her journalism career in Montana after earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Montana School of Journalism. She reported for the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, Montana, and the Big Fork Eagle in Big Fork, Montana, before moving to the Central Coast to work as a staff writer for the Sun in 2013. Camillia earned a master's degree in public policy from Cal Poly in 2020 and has won awards from both state and national organizations for government, enterprise, environmental, and agricultural reporting. She teaches journalism ethics at Cal Poly and is a true believer in local journalism’s ability to empower communities to participate in democracy and advocate for themselves. Her free time is spent outdoors, where she loves to camp, hike, and backpack or in the kitchen, where she loves to cook.

Andrea Rooks is passionate about advocating for both reader and writer, upholding the rules of grammar and punctuation while listening to the voice of the writer as they tell important stories to the local community. She got her love for journalism as an editor of her high school paper in Santa Rosa and later graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Shortly after graduation, Andrea started her career at the Santa Maria Sun, New Times’ newborn sister paper, and over the next six years she worked as a staff writer, news editor, and the editor. She left the newsroom to raise her two daughters but continued freelance writing and editing, and in 2014 she returned to New Times and the Sun as the proofreader. In 2019, she became associate editor. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University in 2018. When not writing and editing, Andrea enjoys walking and hiking around the Central Coast, wine tasting with her husband, taking her teenage daughters to coffee, reading, crafting, and volunteering with her church.

Caleb Wiseblood edits the calendar section for New Times and writes the Arts and Eats columns in the New Times’ sister paper, the Sun. His contributions to the Sun began in 2016 while he worked as an intern and freelance writer. Before becoming a staffer at New Times in 2017, Caleb was a frequent contributor at Coyote + Oak, a Central Coast-based arts and lifestyle magazine. He graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2015. Outside of covering the local art scene and new restaurants in the area, Caleb enjoys hanging out with his chihuahua and watching movies. The latter hobby occasionally bleeds into work hours when he gets to write film reviews.

Award-winning journalist and Senior Staff Writer Glen Starkey has worked part-time at New Times since 1991, when he began freelancing a weekly column about the local live music scene. It was the beginning of a long and deeply unlucrative career, but a good side hustle to complement his job as a lecturer in Cal Poly’s English Department where he’s taught writing classes since 1998. Over his journalism career, he’s turned his personal interests into more articles for New Times covering art, theater, and film reviews, as well as feature stories. During his tenure, Starkey’s tackled heroin use, prostitution, violence in the surf culture, the surveillance state, and what it’s like to do every job at the California Mid-State Fair from hog ear-tagger to Jessica Simpson’s roadie to hotdog on a stick maker and mirror joint carnie. Now more than three decades into his writing career, he feels like he’s starting to get the hang of this journalism thing. A little more practice and he might even become proficient. Fingers crossed.

Bulbul Rajagopal has worked for New Times since 2021 and covers courts, cops, homelessness, inequality, and everything SLO County Board of Supervisors, while moonlighting as a food and drink writer and dabbling in the occasional film review. She graduated from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism with a master’s in journalism. Bulbul is passionate about data science, digging through documents, and old-school shoe-leather reporting. In 2023, two of her stories won second place through the California News Publishers Association for in-depth reporting and local election coverage. She previously worked Crosstown in LA where her team received a LION Award nomination for a live COVID-19 infection map. She belonged to the Associated Press data team that tabulated live results for the 2020 presidential election. Bulbul grew up on the east and south coasts of India, which instilled in her a love for soccer, politics, and food. She worked in the Kolkata bureau as a breaking news intern for the Indian national daily, the Hindu. She loves to hike, cook, do yoga, and hyper fixate on Nicolas Cage movies in her spare time.

Samantha Herrera became a New Times staff writer in 2023. She covers Pismo Beach, Avila Beach, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, Oceano, and Nipomo. Samantha graduated from San Jose State University in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. During her time at SJSU she was managing editor for the Spartan Daily. She grew up in Huntington Beach and enjoys spending her free time at the beach, reading, and exploring new parts of San Luis Obispo County.

Jayson Mellom began his photojournalism career at the Marion Chronicle-Tribune in Indiana. He then moved on to the Athens Daily News and then The Atlanta Journal/Constitution before eventually settling in San Luis Obispo. He worked for the SLO Tribune for 16 years and has been New Times’ photographer since 2016. Along the way, he’s won state, regional, and national awards for his photojournalism; has been published in National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, In Touch, and Der Spiegel magazines; and has had photos in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times.