Paula Peterson
Paula Peterson connects coverage of homes and housing with the wider civic, business, and public safety stories around Lake Tahoe. She is the publisher and editor of South Tahoe Now, overseeing its news operation and leading its community journalism. Her byline on the masthead spans a decade of work, with archives showing continuous reporting from 2016 through 2026. Her primary beat includes real estate, and she treats property coverage as part of a larger story about housing availability, school enrollment, retail turnover, and land use.
Housing, real estate, and community change
Peterson’s most distinctive work on real estate sits at the intersection of housing policy and community institutions. In an op-ed on housing and school enrollment, she traces how changes in the local housing stock affect student numbers and the viability of neighborhood schools, treating property as an essential anchor for families and services. Her coverage of housing issues reinforces this theme, explaining how shifts in residential patterns underlie much of what is happening in the community today.
Alongside analytical pieces, she contributes service-oriented real estate content such as the South Tahoe Association of Realtors Home of the Week, highlighting individual properties in the context of the area’s market and lifestyle. She also reports on stories like tree poisonings that threaten high-value properties and landscape aesthetics, extending her housing lens to environmental damage and enforcement efforts.
Retail closures and openings, including reports on a Pier 1 store closing and new business licenses being issued, show her interest in how commercial real estate turnover reshapes shopping corridors and employment.
Civic news, crime, and accountability
A large portion of Peterson’s reporting focuses on crime, courts, and government accountability. She regularly compiles detailed call logs from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office, selecting incidents from the South and West Shore and presenting them in a straightforward format that documents patterns of local enforcement.
Her coverage of fraud and grand theft cases involving school board members and other officials combines court records with clear explanations of the alleged schemes and their impact on public institutions. Reporting on wire fraud charges against a former mayor and sentencing outcomes for another shows her willingness to follow cases through to resolution and to track the consequences for officeholders.
Related stories on missing funds at organizations such as Pet Network Lake Tahoe further illustrate her focus on financial stewardship and trust within civic and nonprofit bodies.
Business, tourism, and local economy
Peterson’s business coverage treats local enterprises and tourism assets as indicators of broader economic health. She writes feature pieces on long-running businesses like GaiaLicious Global Gifts and Ernie’s Coffee Shop, using anniversaries and milestones to show how individual proprietors adapt to changing conditions.
Her reporting on casino gaming revenue, including stories noting percentage changes in South Shore casino wins, connects hospitality performance to employment, tax flows, and investment.
Articles on new business licenses and renovated resorts, such as the unveiling of a revamped Caesars Republic property, track how openings, remodels, and branding shifts transform the commercial landscape and visitor experience. Older archives show similar attention to store closures, gaming revenue trends, and water use restrictions that affect businesses as well as residents, underscoring the continuity of her economic lens over time.
Weather, roads, and events
Peterson also produces a steady stream of practical reporting on weather, roads, and infrastructure that helps readers plan daily life. Weekly forecasts, wind advisories, and notes on dry or wet periods are combined with information about road conditions and Caltrans construction projects to show how climate and infrastructure interact around Lake Tahoe.
She covers traffic impacts and resurfacing work zones, emphasizing where enforcement will increase and how long travelers can expect delays, which gives her reporting a clear service orientation.
She reports closely on earthquakes and wildfires near the lake, providing timely updates on magnitude, containment, and local impacts. Her events coverage chronicles community rituals and gatherings, from the Pony Express Re-Ride and Highway 50 Wagon Train run to historic cemetery tours, ambulance building ceremonies, and spiritual summits. Taken together, these stories situate real estate and the built environment within a rhythm of festivals, commemorations, and civic openings that define the area’s public life.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aaron Elstein
Aaron Elstein brings a Wall Street reporter’s eye to commercial real estate. He is a senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where he covers large office towers, Midtown corridors, landlords, lenders, investors and regulators. His reporting shows how ownership decisions, bank balance sheets, capital markets and regulation shape property values and risk. He also covers banking, finance and Wall Street, including bank mergers and investment firms. Before joining Crain’s in 2003, he wrote Heard on the Street columns for The Wall Street Journal and covered bank mergers for American Banker. Elstein reports by closely reading footnotes, contracts, regulatory filings and legal documents. His investigative work has examined executive payments, pension funds, tax enforcement and tenant harassment. His coverage places deals, disputes and enforcement actions within broader financial and property cycles.
Aaron Moselle
Aaron Moselle covers housing and community development for WHYY’s PlanPhilly, filing for radio and the web. He stands out for connecting market data and government action to displacement, affordable homes, and the daily questions facing renters and homeowners. His core beat is housing affordability and market strain, including high mortgage rates, rising prices, tax assessments, and what they mean for buyers, sellers, and renters. He also reports on preserving and creating affordable housing, neighborhood rehab efforts, major real estate deals, and the effect of property sales on residents. His work often uses direct sourcing, plain language, and service journalism to make policy and finance clear.
Aarthi Swaminathan
Aarthi Swaminathan is a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch whose distinctive beat connects residential real estate with household budgets. She covers housing prices, affordability, mortgage rates, financing, insurance, remodeling and the costs of owning a home. Her reporting examines overvalued and fast-rising markets, ZIP-code trends, second-home sellers, builders, developers and buyers facing higher borrowing costs. She also follows Gen Z buyers, owners trapped in weakening condo markets and neighborhood conflicts over development. Her work pairs data-driven housing analysis with detailed case studies of buyers, owners and sellers. She explains complex market data in clear, accessible language and writes news features, personal-finance explainers, Economic Report stories, The Big Move and New American Playbook. She won a silver award for Best Collection of Work by an Individual Covering Residential Real Estate.
Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson stands out for reporting how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, especially the real estate deals that reveal what land and retail space are worth. She covers Central Texas commercial real estate and development for KWTX, with recent stories on land valuation, major transactions, retail redevelopment, and infrastructure planning. Her work has tracked an $80 million data center site offer in Hill County, a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, and a planning project using artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns. She writes as a news reporter, staying close to the numbers, public records, brokers, officials, and landowners. Her stories turn contract prices, appraisal data, and listing history into plain explanations of what buyers are betting on and how those deals affect surrounding property owners and nearby businesses.