“A year ago, SFGATE launched a national parks bureau — a big bet on America’s best idea. We hired journalists across the American West to report in and around parks in California, the Pacific Northwest, Big Sky Country and the Southwest. We asked them to report on the things that make people fall in love with the parks but also to dig deeply into the many threats confronting the National Park Service, from climate change to staffing shortages to overtourism. The bureau has chronicled everything from lead poisonings in Park Service employee housing and the indefinite closure of Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest to Yosemite in chaos and quiet crisis in the Channel Islands. Now, we’re launching a new effort aimed at giving readers direct access to both our reporting and our national parks journalists…

• So, we’re launching an SFGATE National Parks WhatsApp channel where readers can opt in to receive story alerts directly on their phones. Once that channel reaches critical mass, we’ll give readers direct access to a WhatsApp “Community,” where national parks visitors can tap directly into our parks journalists, who were lauded just last week by the Columbia Journalism Review for their “excellent and rigorous reporting.”