During Thursday’s keynote at the 2026 Associated Collegiate Press Spring National College Media Conference in San Francisco, Cassie Dickman sat among her students, occasionally leaning over to answer a question or offer a quick observation about the speaker’s advice.
From a few rows back, she listened the way journalists do: attentive, analytical, engaged. Even in a conference ballroom, surrounded by student reporters trying to absorb as much as they could, Dickman seemed to slip naturally into the role she now occupies so often: mentor, editor, guide.
For the students seated near her, those quiet exchanges were just part of being around Dickman. But the moment also captured something larger about her path through journalism. Long before she was guiding student reporters through conference sessions, newsroom culture and tough edits, she was sitting in the same position herself.
A community college student trying to figure out what kind of future journalism might offer.
Back then, she did not necessarily set out to become a journalist. But reporting kept pulling her in.
Today, Dickman serves as deputy editor and local accountability editor at Stocktonia News Service, a nonprofit newsroom focused on watchdog reporting in Stockton. She is also co-adviser to The Experience, the student newspaper at Los Medanos College, the same campus where her own journalism career began.
Her story is, in many ways, a community college journalism story.
Dickman grew up in California along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta near the edge of the East Bay Area. She attended Los Medanos College, where she earned an associate degree in journalism before transferring to California State University, Sacramento. There, she completed a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a minor in creative writing. In 2023, she earned a master’s degree in journalism from Ball State University with a specialization in reporting and storytelling.
But if the degrees show the formal path, Dickman is clear that the real education began much earlier, inside the community college newsroom.
“I remember that it was both terrifying and exhilarating,” Dickman said of her early days as a student reporter at Los Medanos. “It’s sort of the first step into that world.”
The feeling, she said, came from how immediate the work felt. There was little distance between student practice and professional expectation.
“The thing about community colleges is they sort of just toss you in it,” she said. “You just had to do the job, and it felt like a real job. It wasn’t just the student newspaper.”
That experience shaped her from the start. At Los Medanos, Dickman took on role after role — editor-in-chief, campus page editor, managing editor — while working long hours in the newsroom, sometimes 30 to 40 hours a week. She also did investigative reporting, the kind of work that demands patience, curiosity and a willingness to keep following a thread long after others might stop.
Her former adviser, Cindy McGrath, remembers seeing that drive early.
McGrath, the journalism program lead at Los Medanos College since 1988, said Dickman first enrolled as a biology major. She had planned to become an environmental biologist and initially took a journalism class because she wanted a break from the heavy load of math and science courses.
But once she started reporting, McGrath said, something clicked.
Dickman latched onto a story about a new satellite campus and the controversy surrounding where it would be built. According to McGrath, that story eventually turned into an 11-part investigative series — an unusually ambitious reporting project for a community college student.
McGrath said Dickman was relentless.
“She was like a dog with a bone,” McGrath said, describing how Dickman kept digging into the story and returning to the newsroom.
McGrath recalled encouraging her to recognize what her work was already showing: she was a journalist.
At first, Dickman resisted. She kept insisting she was not going to become one. But McGrath remembers the moment that changed.
One day, she said, Dickman walked in, slammed her books on the table and told her, “Cindy, I hate you. I just dropped my biology and math classes and changed my major to journalism.”
The moment has become part of the lore surrounding Dickman’s path into the field, but it also reveals something essential about how she works. She did not drift casually into journalism. She argued with it, tested it, resisted it, and then committed fully.
That commitment carried her into professional newsrooms.
Her clips from Los Medanos helped her land her first professional opportunity at The Sacramento Bee, where she started as a breaking news intern. She later became the paper’s deputy op-ed editor and California Influencers project manager.
From there, she moved into one of the most demanding beats in local journalism: government reporting in Stockton.
At The Stockton Record, part of the USA Today Network, Dickman covered protests, public institutions, criminal justice and the COVID-19 pandemic, including the city’s first cases and deaths and hospitals overwhelmed during the crisis.
The work was high stakes and intensely local, the kind of journalism that requires both urgency and depth. It was also the kind of reporting experience that would later shape how she mentors students.
“I think it made me a community journalist,” Dickman said of her roots in community college reporting. “Community college is just that — it’s a community.”
That philosophy still defines her work now.
At Stocktonia, Dickman helps lead accountability reporting in a city where public institutions often demand close scrutiny. Stocktonia Executive Editor Scott Linesburgh said Dickman was essential to building the newsroom in its early days.
“We couldn’t have done this without her,” Linesburgh said. “She believed in the mission to bring better, more accurate journalism to Stockton.”
He said her passion for both investigative journalism and teaching made her especially valuable in a newsroom that often works with young reporters. At one point, Linesburgh compared Stocktonia to a teaching hospital — a place where journalists are learning by doing — and said Dickman’s ability to teach while reporting made her a near-perfect fit.
That ability to move between the professional newsroom and the college newsroom is part of what makes Dickman distinctive.
At Los Medanos, she now helps students navigate the same pressures she once faced: deadlines, uncertainty, interviews that do not go as planned and stories that change shape in the reporting. Her lessons, former students say, are direct and unsentimental, but deeply useful.
Juan Cebreiros Jr., now a student at Fresno State who worked with Dickman at The Experience from fall 2022 through spring 2025, said she brought a perspective that helped bridge the distance between a college paper and a professional one.
“She didn’t sugarcoat things,” Cebreiros said. “Cassie pushed us to go after information and not take interviews at face value.”
He said one of the biggest lessons he learned from her was that journalism does not reward passivity. If a reporter wants the story, the information or the job, they have to go after it.
That lesson, he said, stayed with him.
McGrath said Dickman’s effectiveness as a mentor comes from the fact that she has lived both sides of the relationship.
“She knows what it’s like to be both a student who needs mentoring and a journalist who can serve as a mentor,” McGrath said.
Now, years after first learning the rhythms of a student newsroom at Los Medanos, Dickman is back in that environment from the other side: advising students, teaching classes and helping rebuild the culture of campus journalism after the disruptions of the pandemic.
For McGrath, working alongside a former student has been deeply meaningful.
“It’s kind of like a dream,” she said.
For Dickman, though, the core message she gives students is less sentimental and more practical. Journalism, she tells them, is hard. Mistakes happen. Fear is normal. None of that means they should stop.
“If you’re afraid, that’s OK,” she said. “If you screw up, it’s not the end of the world. Just keep learning and don’t ever stop.”
