Adam Dawes

Notable work and positions

Embarcadero Media Foundation - President and CEO
Google News Initiative - Senior Product Manager (prior role)
The Almanac - journalist (early career)

Biography

Adam Dawes is a Palo Alto native who leads Embarcadero Media Foundation, the nonprofit publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly, The Almanac, the Mountain View Voice, the Pleasanton Weekly, DanvilleSanRamon.com and Palo Alto Online. He first worked in journalism as one of the editors-in-chief of The Campanile, the student newspaper at Palo Alto High School, and later did reporting work for The Almanac. He earned a bachelor's degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford Business School in the late 1990s, then spent more than twenty years in Silicon Valley technology roles, including fourteen years at Google, where his final position was senior product manager for the Google News Initiative, a program that works with news organizations worldwide on digital business strategy. Dawes joined the board of directors of Embarcadero Media in 2013 and was named president and CEO in September 2022, succeeding longtime publisher Bill Johnson. Under his leadership the company converted from a for-profit corporation to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in November 2023, produced its first annual report and completed its first audit as a nonprofit, hired its first development director, and worked toward the company's first collective bargaining agreement with the Pacific Media Workers Guild, which represents many of the organization's journalists and designers. In May 2026, Dawes announced he would step down as CEO later in the year to allow a new leader to guide the organization's next chapter.

Career highlights

• Nonprofit conversion 2023 · Led Embarcadero Media's transition from a for-profit company to the nonprofit Embarcadero Media Foundation.
• Digital platform overhaul 2024 · Oversaw the relaunch of all seven Embarcadero Media Foundation news websites on a new content management platform.
• Financial turnaround · Guided the organization to two consecutive years of surplus following five years of losses, amid a period in which print advertising revenue fell more than 42 percent since the end of 2019.