Maria Sestito reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on issues facing the areas exploding senior citizen population. Before earning her master’s degree at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2020, Sestito was the public safety reporter at the Napa Valley Register. While there, she covered murder trials and the North Bay Wildfires. She also started her own lifestyle column called “Jersey Girl.” Before moving to California, Sestito worked at The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. as a photographer and general assignment reporter. She is originally from New Jersey and received a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University in 2012. Sestito has won several California News Publishers Association awards for Best Writing, Best Column, and Breaking News. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for the study of Arabic and a Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Fellow. At Berkeley, she won the Dean’s Merit Fellowship.
Beat: Growing senior population in the Palm Springs area
This Reporter chronicles the joys and challenges of aging well, an empathetic and patient journalist curious about the lives of seniors, policies that affect them, resources available to them—and those that are lacking. We seek a storyteller who one day might write about dating in nursing homes, the next day might dig into drug price data, and the next examine the senior center budget. This Reporter would team up with our government and health Reporters. Seniors are the most passionate newspaper readers (and our best customers) but some struggle with technology and don’t know how to access our digital features. Our RFA plays an ambassador role, helping seniors learn how to engage with our digital products, from news alerts to Alexa apps, via in-person workshops.