It wasn’t as if Veronica Napoles set out to make good trouble.

When I interviewed her at her Larkspur house in 2014 for an upcoming exhibit, she was retired from a long career as a graphic designer and branding specialist and focusing on her fine art. We became fast friends.

Since then, Veronica has called Marin and Sonoma counties home. In 2017, she started noticing that a real estate investor was snatching up properties near her Sonoma valley house — iconic places like Ramekins culinary school, the General’s Daughter, Ravenswood Winery and the Sonoma Cheese Factory. She began connecting the dots. And at some point, she realized that the investor, Ken Mattson, was cozy with Tim LeFever, a conservative lobbyist and member of the secretive, anti-LGBT, right-wing Council for National Policy, via their partnership, LeFever Mattson.

She got curious. Many of the properties Mattson bought years ago still remain empty or in disrepair. Who would spend that kind of money and leave their properties to languish, she wondered.

And when the amount of properties — more than 90 commercial and residential properties in the valley— approached $200 million since 2015, she got more than just curious. She became an accidental activist, forming Wake Up Sonoma last December to alert her community and organizing peaceful weekly demonstrations at vacant Mattson properties.

Pressure from the group led Mattson to scrap a proposed plaza off Highway 12 in January, but not before closing on an eyebrow-raising off-market deal — two houses valued at $1.64 million in 2022 but purchased for $6 million, sold by a Sonoma County planning commissioner who stepped down a mere few weeks before the sale.

The group’s hard work in protecting their community has gotten its share of press, not only from the small local papers, but also from the county’s paper of record, the Press Democrat, as well as TV. But I can’t help but think what would have happened if, given the state of newspapers today, my friend hadn’t started poking around.

As you may know, the state of newspapers is dire. Yet they are so essential for democracy.

Look at the controversy surrounding newly elected New York Rep. George Santos. While most people learned about his numerous lies through the New York Times, it was actually a tiny local weekly newspaper with a circulation of 5,000 and a readership of about 20,000, the North Shore Leader, that exposed his deceptions months before the Times or any other media outlet was paying attention.

That’s what local papers were always about. It’s how the Point Reyes Light won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s for exposing Synanon, a drug rehabilitation center that turned into a cult. Local papers understand their communities.

But local journalism has suffered — two newspapers shut their doors every week — at a time when misinformation and conspiracy theories are rampant and our country is more divided than ever.

The IJ has suffered, too. We were bought by Alden Global Capital years ago, a hedge fund that buys media outlets that have real estate as the IJ once had in Novato and is now snatching up mobile home parks. We, like other newspapers it bought, lost a lot of our staff.

And with each round of layoffs, the remaining reporters, editors and photographers took on more and more work (without any more pay). Which makes exposing cults or corrupt politicians that much harder.

And they count on that. When local papers close, corporate corruption goes up, research has found. Because few, if any, residents are paying attention.

And who can blame them, what with a pandemic, extreme weather events, war, a growing unhoused population, inflation, wildfires, drought, mass shootings and everything in between weighing heavy on our minds and hearts.

But Veronica did.

An IJ reader emailed me after my last column, on Marin’s racially problematic traffic stops, asking — what can residents do?

Well, lots.

Besides voting — sheriffs are elected but do not report to any county official — you can attend local government meetings. Look at your local police departments’ traffic stop data as per the Racial and Identity Profiling Act and if you see something upsetting, ask, “Why is this happening?” Get curious. Pay attention.

Get involved. Not just in your immediate city or town, but in parts of the county that house our most marginalized and vulnerable residents. Speak truth to power. Be like Veronica and become an activist, accidental or not. Your county, our county, will only be as fair, just and equitable as we demand it to be.

And while you’re at it, please support your local newspaper. The next corruption it uncovers could be in your hood.

Vicki Larson’s So It Goes opinion column runs every other week. Contact her at vlarson@marinij.com and follow her on Twitter at OMG Chronicles.