At precisely the time California newsrooms are shrinking, the state is experiencing its worst budget and governance crisis in decades.
Come meet members of the California Watch leadership team and other media professionals this Friday at noon at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as they consider the implications of these simultaneous realities.
Quality journalism is still being done around the state, but in a less sustained way than a decade ago. This is certainly the case nationally as a number of reports have asserted. The downsizing of the news media raises troubling questions about how Californians will be informed about what is happening in the state -- in both public and private institutions that affect their lives in fundamental ways.
I'll be moderating the panel, which will consist of Sandy Close, executive director of New America Media; Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission; Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director; Martin Reynolds, editor of the Oakland Tribune; and David Lauter, assistant managing editor/California, Los Angeles Times.
For more information, or to buy a ticket, check out this listing on the Commonwealth Club Web site.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
As California Watch ramps up distribution of its work, we are experimenting with different ways to reach the California public.
Our goal is to distribute our stories as widely as possible, in as many media formats as possible – in the hope that we will be able to spark a conversation on critically important issues affecting many Californians.
Typically, we like to give media outlets interested in running a story a heads up of a week or two – or more – so they will have an opportunity to supplement our reports with their own local reporting. They may even collaborate with us in the reporting.
This week, however, we had to shorten our distribution time frame considerably on a story Nathanael Johnson had been working on for weeks – the near tripling of maternal mortality rates in California over the past decade.
Nathanael discovered that California's Department of Public Health had been sitting on a report written in 2008 detailing this trend.
On January 26, a nonprofit health organization published an alert pointing to similar distressing trends nationwide. The alert was beginning to attract press attention. A story could break at any time that would take the wind out of all the work Nathanael had already done. So we felt that we should release our story quickly to provide a strong California perspective on a breaking national story.
We knew we could put the story on our Web site and hope that it would go "viral." We considered that as an option but decided even with late notice, we would reach out to other news organizations.
Imagine trying to coordinate publication of a major story with a dozen news outlets, encompassing print, broadcast and online media. With just a day's notice, several media partners responded rapidly, and ran the story on their front pages, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Bakersfield Californian, Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Orange County Register.
Michael Montgomery, who works jointly for California Watch and KQED, prepared a report for KQED's the California Report, which aired on 28 public radio stations around the state. KGO-TV in San Francisco aired a report on its 11 p.m. newscast. New America Media distributed the story to ethnic media outlets. The issue was the subject of a one-hour discussion on KQED's Forum, hosted by Michael Krasny. Alternet also carried the story.
This heartbreaking issue is likely to get even wider attention in the days ahead, as it should. While we would far prefer to give our media partners adequate time to localize our stories, there will be times that we will have to throw out preconceived timetables, and we will have no choice but to move rapidly to get a story into circulation. Being nimble is the name of today's game.
California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.
CIR board member Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, is making waves with a new report on the numerous challenges facing journalism in the United States: "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." Downie coauthored the report with sociologist Michael Schudson, who has joint appointments at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and UC San Diego. They make a powerful case for more "accountability news reporting" of the kind that CIR has been doing for several decades.
Downie and Schudson put forward a number of recommendations, including urging universities to assume a more central role in doing reporting that traditionally newspapers have undertaken, and making information collected by local, state and federal governments more accessible to promote more informed citizen journalism.
Their most controversial proposal—by far—is that the federal government subsidize local news coverage. The FCC, they argue, "should direct some of the money from the telephone bill surcharge—or from fees paid by radio and television licensees, or proceeds from auctions of telecommunications spectrum, or new fees imposed on Internet service providers—to finance a Fund for Local News that would make grants for advances in local news reporting and innovative ways to support it."
This is a variation on arguments made over the years by various observers, including a compelling article by John Nichols and Robert McChesney in The Nation earlier this year.
If the United Kingdom can do it by underwriting the BBC with television license fees, why shouldn't we do something similar in the United States? The idea is not as outlandish as it may seem, as Nichols and McChesney write. It is one that dates back to the nation's founding.
According to Nichols and McChesney:
Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.
A Fund for Local News is a terrific idea. Whether it should—or could—be underwritten by the United States government is another question altogether. Let the debate begin.
This week, California Watch staffers crowded into CIR's tiny conference room to meet with two guests, Laura Scott and Katherine Lawrence, who had arrived from Denver for the day.
They're principals in PingVision, the Web design firm we have chosen from among several excellent candidates to design and develop California Watch's new Web site. PingVision's clients have included BlogHer, Popular Science, the New York Public Library, the Stanford University Center for Internet and Society and Red Blue America.
There was a sense of urgency in the room - and not just because Laura and Katherine's plane had been delayed. The launch date for our Web site - and the formal launch of California Watch - is set for early November, which gives PingVision about a month to get the site up and running.
The Web site will be the only one devoted to statewide investigative and other in-depth reporting about California.
Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director, articulated a broad and ambitious vision for the site. A major focus would be to highlight solutions. It would showcase the blogs that all California Watch bloggers will begin writing in the next several weeks.
"We want this to be a place that people will check in on several times a day," he said.
The site also will house searchable databases and be a "one-stop center" for anyone seeking information in California on state and federal campaign contributions, lobbying, business licenses and more.
The countdown has begun. Watch out for our new site in a month or so from now.
It’s not often that I get choked up reading an e-mail message from a fellow journalist.
But that’s what happened when I got a message from Pedro Rojas, executive editor of La Opinion, the Spanish language daily in Los Angeles.
I had asked him whether we could share the Spanish translation that La Opinion had given us of California Watch’s story on homeland security with other papers that were going to run the story the next day.
“Go ahead,” Pedro wrote. “We should learn to share in time of challenges.”
Pedro Rojas was an example of what the downsizing of the media, along with the imperative to work in multimedia formats, has wrought: a potentially game-changing shift from the media’s dominant ethos of competition to a much more collaborative one.
Earlier in the day, we had provided California Watch’s story on homeland security to La Opinion, with a customized LA angle; we waived our normal fee in exchange for a translation of the article, which Pedro provided us in an astonishingly swift three hours -- and we posted it on our web site. Our article appeared, in Spanish, on the front page of La Opinion the next day, 9/11.
La Opinion’s gesture underscored the power of collaborative journalism.
We encountered other similar ones as we assembled a story that ultimately ran simultaneously in over two dozen newspapers.
The lead paragraph of the story described homeland security equipment purchased years ago in Marin County that had never been used. The Marin Independent Journal sent a photographer to take a photo of the unused equipment -- and gave us permission to share it with all our other media partners, again without charge.
Dan Noyes, the investigative reporter at KGO TV in San Francisco, was simultaneously working on a television version of our story. He was able to convince Matthew Bettenhausen, the acting secretary of California’s Emergency Management Agency to speak with him. Bettenhausen had avoided talking to Schulz for months, despite repeated requests.
KGO placed the entire unedited interview with Bettenhausen on its website -- and allowed us to post it on our website. They also promoted our story in a news story that led KGO’s 11 p.m newscast, sending readers to our website for multimedia features on ours.
As we approached our deadline, California Watch reporter George Schulz wrote a memo on homeland security spending in San Joaquin County for the Lodi News Sentinel, which helped News Sentinel reporter Jordan Guinn write a detailed sidebar to accompany Schulz story.
These are the kinds of collaborations that California Watch is counting on happening in the months ahead: news organizations sharing resources, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways.