From working at The Talon to founding local independent student newspaper Midpeninsula Post, Los Altos High School graduates Tomoki Chien (‘22) and Gil Rubinstein (‘23) are longtime journalists. Now, they’re working on a new news outlet: College Brief.
College Brief is an intermediary between traditional newspaper articles and fast-paced social media news consumption that arrives in students’ inboxes every morning. University of Southern California (USC) sophomore Chien founded College Brief after running Morning, Trojan at USC, a daily newsletter of school and local news for students.
“We started this space because a lot of students are patting [themselves] on the back, thinking, ‘Oh my God, [journalism is] this service for this community,” Chien said. “But then no one reads it. So we need a formula that people want.”
College Brief supplements people’s knowledge by providing quick news. Their newsletters, personalized to different college campuses and written by writers from the college, deliver two-minute-long news reads featuring short college, local and national news stories to students. It has since expanded to service Cal Poly Slo with Morning, Mustang and UC Berkeley with Morning, Cal.
We started this space because a lot of students are patting [themselves] on the back, thinking, ‘Oh my God, [journalism is] this service for this community. But then no one reads it. So we need a formula that people want.
— LAHS graduate Tomoki Chien (‘22)
On Saturday, March 16, the organization hosted a fundraising event at the Los Altos Community Center. The event attracted prominent community members, including Los Altos School District (LASD) board president Brian Johnson, Mountain View-Los Altos School District (MVLASD) superintendent Nellie Meyer, Los Altos mayor Jonathan Winberg and California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo as a featured speaker.
Rubenstein, a freshman at the University of Chicago, works alongside Chien as the Director of Development. According to Chien and Rubinstein, a newspaper model with a curated news selection will increase youth interest in learning about the events happening around them.
“If you’re going to build that kind of habit in a young kid, it’s got to be something they see and understand,” Johnson said. “Find things that are relevant to them and show them how to get more information.”
As high school graduates and college students enter adulthood, they begin to participate in democracy. However, many young people who will vote might be unaware of all the issues or what’s happening.
“We’ve become such an ‘instantized’ society,” Eshoo said in her speech at the event in response to the current state of media consumption. “There’s become a great deal of manipulation, disinformation and misinformation. This is all chipping away at our democracy.”
College Brief, whose goal is to cultivate an informed student body, is trying to expand its operations to more college campuses in California and hopes to expand out of the state by 2025.
“We want to be at California community colleges and Santa Clara University, and eventually reach every other college across the country,” Rubenstein said.
To learn more about College Brief, visit collegebrief.org.
