It’s intern season at California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ve been fortunate to have interns year-round. But summer is a special time. New intern blood transfuses our newsroom. Exuberant, wide-eyed youngsters strive to make their mark during short stints as reporters, web producers and copy editors.

Ah, the internship.

My first came 26 years ago at the now-defunct Peninsula Times Tribune, a small, local paper in downtown Palo Alto. I can’t even begin to measure what I learned in those three months.

One of my biggest early influences in the Palo Alto newsroom was Judy Miller, then the young city editor of the Times Tribune. She soon left for the San Francisco Chronicle. Later, she directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at the Miami Herald where she eventually rose to managing editor.

Judy earned the nickname “Bulldog.” And it fit. I’ve never met anyone as tenacious and as relentless. I ran into her at the recent gathering of Investigative Reporters and Editors in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. We reminisced about the old days, and what she meant to my career. She inspired reporters to dig deep and to stop only when you reached the bottom.

Judy has been an important mentor over the years. She's always been available as a sounding board when I've been stuck. And yet, I can’t remember if she said even two words to me during my summer internship.

Her influence went beyond mere words. She taught by example. If you stopped for just a second to watch her in action, you learned a ton. And if you stopped too long, you would likely get a sharp look back, as if to wonder – no, demand – your next front page story.

I could only hope that our interns this summer will find their own mentor or influential figure somewhere among our own accomplished staff – whether it’s one of our superb veterans such as Lance Williams, Susanne Rust, Michael Montgomery, Mark Schapiro, Louis Freedberg or Bob Salladay. Or one of our talented younger guns like Mark Luckie, Erica Perez, Ryan Gabrielson, Christina Jewett, Corey Johnson, G.W. Schulz, Carrie Ching, Andy Becker or Chase Davis.

Every one of us remembers what it was like to be an intern. And we’re all here to help.

And I'm personally thrilled to see all the energy in our newsroom. One of the more unpleasant things I had to do in my last job was call a young college student we had selected for an internship a few weeks earlier to relay the bad news that her internship had been canceled. In a budget crisis, the interns were the first to go.

This summer our interns aren't exactly getting rich off their paychecks from us. But we are proud that we are offering so many internships at a time when many news organizations are still living without the help of eager college students.

So without further ado, let me introduce our current crop of interns:

Austin Fast is a Dow Jones News Fund copy editing intern with California Watch and assists in producing Politics Verbatim. He is a recent graduate of Miami University (of Ohio) with degrees in journalism and international studies. While in college, Austin produced stories at Miami's NPR station, served as editor in chief of Miami's student newspaper and completed an internship with an online news wire service in Pristina, Kosovo.

Mandy Hofmockel is a Dow Jones News Fund web production intern for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is a senior majoring in media studies and political science at Penn State University. Mandy has worked as a reporter, copy editor and web editor for her college newspaper for the past three years. She also spent a summer reporting for her local paper.

Timothy Sandoval is a reporting intern in the Sacramento bureau for California Watch. He has covered the California State University budget crisis, student protests, and general news stories for The State Hornet, CSU Sacramento’s newspaper. Timothy grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated from St. John Bosco High School, and attended Cal Poly Pomona from 2007 to 2009. He currently attends Sacramento State and is set to graduate in 2012.

Alex Brewer is a reporting intern for the Center for Investigative Reporting where he will primarily work with Andy Becker on immigration stories and with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Alex is the annual Neil Isaacs and Frank Wright Fellow from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Next year he will be a junior pursuing a double bachelor's degree in psychology and cinema media studies. On campus he is also chief content editor for The Lens, Carleton's bi-yearly society and politics magazine. 

Erin Ferguson is a shared reporting intern for KQED Radio, the Ventura County Star and California Watch, based in Sacramento. Erin mostly will be blogging about the state budget. She is a senior in modern literary studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is part of the internship program coordinated by the University of California public affairs journalism program. It's a joint venture between UC Center Sacramento and the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism.

Sarah McHie is the veteran of our intern crew. She started her internship in October with the Center for Investigative Reporting as a web production assistant. Sarah previously was an associate web producer at San Francisco magazine. She is a recent graduate of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana where she obtained a degree in Telecommunications with a concentration in multimedia. 

We expect you'll be seeing their names a lot this summer and for a long time to come.

One of the most gratifying things about California Watch is the speed at which we can embrace innovation. And then go for it.

Today, we’re unveiling a website built by our own Chase Davis called Politics Verbatim. This new site will attempt to track every quote, promise and statement made by our two major candidates for governor in California – Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman.

Check out the search tool that Davis created. It allows readers to sort candidate statements by nine different categories – including promises, attacks, and vague policy points. If they dodge an issue or a subject, there’s a search category for that, too. Readers can also sort by geography, to see where the candidates have been appearing – and what parts of the state they’ve been ignoring.

The site also will include blog posts from Davis, our Senior Editor Robert Salladay and Sacramento based reporter Timothy Sandoval.

The candidates’ statements are sorted by 26 topics – from abortion to welfare.

We are unveiling Politics Verbatim today with about 300 documents and 1,000 excerpts. We will be adding to the site daily, scouring news and campaign sites and Twitter and Facebook feeds. We also are encouraging crowd-sourcing from other journalists and readers. We hope to soon create easy ways for readers to upload video and audio files from public campaign events. California is a massive state, and we can’t provide blanket coverage. But with help from others and from our media partners, we believe we can build a useful, relevant tool in a critical election year. We are hoping to explore additional partnerships with other media outlets to strengthen the content of Politics Verbatim.

Our overarching goal is to create a resource for voters and for those interested in policy. When Davis pitched Politics Verbatim a couple months back, he hoped the site would be a way to bring more accountability to the political process. By tracking the candidates' spoken words, we could hold their feet to the fire when they break promises or fail to live up to campaign pledges.  

We expect the site to evolve in the next few weeks. We’re treating today’s launch as Phase I. We are up and running and functional. We expect to roll out a second phase in the next month or so – a phase that will include easier ways to assess side-by-side the positions of Brown and Whitman. In that respect, Politics Verbatim will help serve as an interactive guide for undecided voters.

Ideally, we would track other candidates and races. And that will be the eventual goal – hopefully sooner rather than later. We'd like to add the U.S. Senate race and initiative campaigns, for instance. But that takes resources. So for now, we’re focusing on the race to become the next chief executive in the nation’s most dysfunctional state.

Politics Verbatim speaks to the advantages of a small newsroom. One reporter had an idea, made a pitch. And it was green-lighted quickly. No mess. No fuss. We’ve been able to move fast to create this project because of the amazing talents of Davis and the lack of obstructions along the way.

I’ve worked in some terrific newsrooms where innovation was valued. But even in the most receptive large newsrooms, I’m betting a project such as Politics Verbatim would have been slowed by multiple rounds of memos, meetings and bureaucratic hurdles that might have sucked the momentum out of the idea.

Several other people deserve credit for today’s launch. Freelancer Coulter Jones and California Watch intern Austin Fast were instrumental in searching for campaign statements and materials to load onto our site. Our Senior Editor Salladay helped shape the project and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White contributed to the look of Politics Verbatim. Davis, who is in his mid 20s, recruited his friends at Upstatement to design our logo and site layout. They did it at a steep discount. I’m told that Davis enticed them with some barbecue and a promise of a Terminator DVD.

You have got to love this generation of innovators.

Please let us know what you think. 

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.

Our newsroom is growing so fast we may need nametags. Today we’re announcing another hire – our first public engagement manager. She’s Ashley Alvarado, a talented young journalist who has been working at Los Angeles and Los Cabos magazines.

Ashley is set to start July 6. She joins other recent hires, Susanne Rust and Joanna Lin, who will be joining us a in few weeks. We also landed Pulitzer Prize winner Ryan Gabrielson, who won’t officially start until Sept. 1.

This wave of hiring brings our California Watch newsroom to 16 people, including 11 reporters. That doesn't even count support, administrative and leadership staff we share with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

So what exactly is a public engagement manager? It’s an innovative, new job that combines the skills of a reporter, editor, web producer and community manager. And Ashley is the perfect person to fill that role.

Since it’s a new job, we expect it to evolve, and Ashley will play a key role helping to shape it. The main aim of the public engagement manager will be to help identify stories in neglected, forgotten and voiceless communities throughout California. Once we tell these stories, Ashley’s job will be to make sure we’re reaching the people who need to know about our work – both the affected parties and those who can make a difference.

We expect that Ashley also will help bring community stakeholders together for town hall-style round table forums or live chats online. She will work collaboratively with reporters and multimedia producers inside our newsroom while building relationships and networks with other news organizations and community stakeholders.

Ultimately we want to make sure our stories make a difference. Ashley will help us meet that goal.

Here’s a little more about her:

Ashley is a graduate of USC where she earned degrees in print journalism and Spanish. She most recently served as a researcher/proof reader at Los Angeles Magazine, where she also contributed stories. She also serves as managing editor of Los Cabos Magazine in Mexico.

Ashley has freelanced for Bon Appetit, the Contra Costa Times, Latina, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Entrepreneur. She also previously worked as a researcher and copy editor at Tu Ciudad Los Angeles until the magazine folded in 2008. She is a native of Eugene, Oregon.

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.

In our ongoing effort to make our website more interactive and engaging, we rolled out a few subtle changes this past weekend.  Some of the refinements are totally under the hood. You won't really see them. We added a spell checker to our writing and editing tool for creating blog posts, for instance. We all pride ourselves in knowing how to use the English language, but it can't hurt to have a spell checker given that our editing staff is fairly small.

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.

California Watch is announcing today the first winner of our “Debate Championship” promotion.

Let’s back up. Last month we announced that we would be giving away free a iPod Touch for the next six months to encourage responsible commenting on our site. At the end of every month, we’ll be taking the best comments posted in response to our stories, blogs and data, and entering names into a drawing. One winner will be chosen each month. (Apple threw in a bunch of freebies when we equipped our staff with new laptops a few months ago, and that's why we're stocked with these iPods.)

And we have our first winner. It’s Barbara Weiss of Sacramento. Weiss, a state worker who also teaches at Sacramento City College, had commented on Chase Davis’ story about vacation payouts to state workers.  

The next drawing will be held in early May. Here are more details about the promotion. Keep those good comments coming.

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.

I’ve barely made a dent in the immense stack of resumes that have flooded our offices in the past two weeks. Last month we posted two new jobs to fill – one investigative reporter focusing on the environment and another investigative reporter covering public safety. Once hired, these two reporters will join what is already the largest investigative team operating in the state.

And we’re about to get even bigger.

Today, we are posting two more new jobs, including another reporting position and the brand new role of public engagement manager. Needless to say, we are extremely pleased that California Watch is in a position to grow and build off our early successes. When we’re done with this little hiring spree, our team will have grown to 17 – including 10 reporters and two multimedia producers.

The most important part about this expansion is that it will allow us to greatly enhance our coverage of critical issues facing a state in crisis.

The job descriptions are right here. The application deadline for our other jobs has passed, but you can see our complete list of job openings on our Employment page.

Enterprise Reporter
California Watch, the state’s largest investigative team, has an opening for an enterprise reporter to write about issues, problems and challenges facing California’s towns, cities and rural communities – zeroing in on real people impacted. We are looking for a gifted story teller, who knows and understands how systemic problems alter the lives of California residents, particularly their health, economic security, and lifespan. An example of this type of story would be the Oakland Tribune’s “Shortened Lives” series. The reporter should have a minimum of five years’ reporting experience and a track record of delivering high-quality enterprise projects. The successful candidate will be expected to balance quick-hit and longer-term enterprise, investigative and explanatory stories along with regular blog posts. We are looking for an innovative thinker and someone who embraces the use of social media and new technology. We want a team player willing to collaborate with regional and local reporters from other news outlets as well as reporters, multimedia producers and administrative staff in our own newsroom. Knowledge of computer assisted reporting and multimedia experience are a significant plus. Bilingual reporting skills are highly valued. Please send resume, cover letter and five deep enterprise work samples to Mark Katches, California Watch editorial director at 2130 Center St. Suite 103, Berkeley, CA 94704. Deadline for applying will be April 23.

Public Engagement Manager
California Watch, the state’s largest investigative team, has an opening for the new position of Public Engagement Manager, an innovative new job that combines the skills of a reporter, editor, web producer and community manager. The successful candidates should have 3-5 years experience as a working journalist. We are looking for a candidate who is an energetic, innovative thinker with organization and leadership skills – a candidate ready to play a pioneering role in our growing organization. The successful candidate will work closely with our editorial director, other senior staff and our reporting and multimedia team on some of our biggest projects. The Public Engagement Manager will build and publish resource guides, newsletters, posters and brochures in multiple languages in local communities – reaching readers and viewers that may not rely on traditional media. An example of this type of journalism is the bilingual “Toxic Treats” poster created by the Orange County Register to highlight Mexican candy that tested high for lead. The Public Engagement Manager also will help bring community stakeholders together for town hall-style round table forums or live chats online. The Public Engagement Manager will actively engage communities online through discussion forums and chats that help bring greater attention and awareness to issues highlighted by our journalism. The Public Engagement Manager will work collaboratively with reporters and multimedia producers inside our newsroom while building relationships and networks with other news organizations and community stakeholders. The successful candidate may help build and implement distribution strategies for our work. We are looking for a candidate who can develop their own sources in local communities to identify and find stories that need to be told by California Watch. We want someone who understands how systemic issues impact California communities and who believes that deep-dive story telling can illuminate and help solve problems. The successful candidate should be someone who embraces the use of social media and new technology. Bilingual skills will be highly valued. Please send resume, cover letter and samples of enterprise work you have written or edited to Mark Katches, California Watch editorial director at 2130 Center St. Suite 103, Berkeley, CA 94704. Deadline for applying will be April 23.

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.

I just spent an hour handing out fliers on a street corner about our latest California Watch story.

“Want to know what buildings on campus are seismically unsafe?” That was how I started my pitch to students walking to UC Berkeley, which has more seismically dangerous buildings than any other public university in the state.

The flier contained a list of buildings rated “poor” or “very poor” in the event of a big quake. It also included our Web address to learn more about the subject. Many of the students who got the fliers were headed to classes in those very buildings on the list. You can download the flier at the bottom of this blog post.

It was a pretty good feeling getting the last flier distributed.

We published our full-length story by Erica Perez on our Web site more than a week ago. The package included maps of UC Berkeley, UCLA, and separate maps of the University of California and California State University systems. We also included an interactive history of earthquakes in California. Newspapers that ran a version of it included the San Francisco Chronicle, Orange County Register, San Diego Union Tribune, Bakersfield Californian, Long Beach Press Telegram and the Eureka Times Standard. The story also was broadcast by KQED Radio, as well as TV stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Long Beach State Daily 49er also ran the story. Our executive director at the Center for Investigative Reporting, Robert Rosenthal, wrote about our distribution methods of the seismic story on our blog last week. In the wake of Chile and Haiti, we plan to do more reporting in the near future about seismic issues in California.

If reaching print, online, TV and radio platforms isn’t broad enough distribution, we created the one-page flier summarizing the story.  A few of us handed them out just outside our offices.

I encountered my share of passersby who put their heads down or their hands up. A few sped up when they saw me. (I might have done the same.) But dozens of others slowed down, took the one-page hand out, stopped and began reading.

It’s all about getting stories into the hands of people who are impacted by our journalism the most – one at a time, if need be.

The flier idea was pitched by Sarah Terry-Cobo who has been helping California Watch distribute stories. We loved it right away. Outside-the-box thinking is highly valued here. Mark S. Luckie, one of our multimedia producers, designed the flier. Because of our location between a BART station and the UC Berkeley campus, our block gets a ton of foot traffic from students, faculty and staff.

Passing out fliers is just one way to take advantage of that foot traffic. We also posted the fliers on kiosks on campus. And we e-mailed PDF versions to student groups on campus so they could pass them along to their members.

We decided to hand out fliers, in part, because of spring break. When we published our story on March 18, we hadn’t realized – until it was too late – that our distribution came right at the start of the spring recess. That meant a lot of UC Berkeley students would be away when the story first appeared. It was a good bet that many students had missed it. Because the story is an investigative piece, it has a lot longer shelf life than a breaking news story, so we believed it was worthwhile to find ways to reach students after they returned to class.

It's no longer just about newsprint, TV, radio or even the Web anymore. California Watch plans to find other untraditional outlets to get the word out when we have an important story to tell.
 

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.

Every Monday it feels like our entire staff gets shot out of a cannon.

In the past few weeks we’ve produced a story examining an unusual, and lucrative, stimulus contract; a story detailing the alarming increase in maternal death rates in California; and a story this past weekend revealing how police at sobriety checkpoints are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than take drunks off the road.

Sunday’s DUI checkpoint story served as a good example of our hectic, intense workflow. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of how our collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, KQED Radio and other news outlets came together last week:

Monday: We started contacting news partners about the checkpoint story, first giving them a several paragraph “budget line.” It pretty closely mirrored the top of the story as written:

California police departments are increasingly turning sobriety checkpoints into profitable operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed minority motorists than catch drunken drivers on the state’s roadways.

Many of the drivers losing their cars at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, an examination by the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with California Watch has found.

These unlicensed motorists rarely challenge the impounds, or have the cash to recover their cars.

Impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated tens of millions of dollars in towing fees and police fines. Additionally, police officers collected checks for about more than $25 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

In the course of its examination, The Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from checkpoints the past two years. Other findings include:

• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods.

• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed.

• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime pay.

Every day in newsrooms across the country, editors and reporters try to capture the interest of their bosses with tantalizing budget lines. Our situation is unique. We pitch our work to multiple outlets at the same time. Will they want our story? And if so, how will they play it?

Robert Rosenthal, the executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Louis Freedberg, the California Watch director who oversees our distribution efforts, began drumming up interest. They sent the budget line to numerous news organizations and followed up with e-mails and phone calls.

In the meantime, our copy editor William Cooley was looking over the story. Copy editors are a rare breed. The best ones are pains in the behind. And they consider it the highest possible compliment to be labeled as such. That’s what I love about Cooley. He is a talented intern from San Jose State. But he carries himself like a veteran.

He has not shied away from asking major prize-winning veteran reporters and editors to explain their methods or their premise. He asks uncomfortable but important questions. And he’s made some outstanding catches that have saved us from potentially embarrassing moments.

Tuesday: The reporter on the project, Ryan Gabrielson, sat down to go over Cooley’s comments and final questions from Rosenthal and me. Gabrielson is a fellow at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award in 2009.

Last summer, he was offered a fellowship at UC Berkeley under the direction of the legendary Lowell Bergman. Soon after arriving in California, he began working on the checkpoint story. Bergman and Gabrielson started talking to us about it late last year and a first draft was submitted in January. I started editing it during our “Open Newsroom” on January 21.

We went back and forth on several drafts and were feeling really good about it. But there was work to do. Cooley had thought we needed more attribution and additional context. Gabrielson and I agreed. I also asked to have his methodology reviewed, so Gabrielson sent it to Steve Doig, a Pulitzer-winning journalism professor at Arizona State University and former board member at Investigative Reporters and Editors.

In the meantime, Data analyst Agustin Armendariz and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White polished a snazzy interactive map of all the cities that got federal funding for checkpoints in 2008 and 2009. They built the map with data Gabrielson had gathered during his reporting.

Wednesday: Time to cut the story. The full-length version of Gabrielson’s draft was about 4,500 words – well over 150 inches. No daily newspaper in California would likely print a story of that length. We trimmed it to about 3,800 words – an appropriate length for the California Watch Web site.

Once that was done, the hard work began. I cut the story again – this time by more than half – to about 1,800 words. At that length it could fit in the news pages of our newspaper partners.

I showed it to Gabrielson, and he didn’t have a heart attack. A good sign. Rosenthal and Freedberg continued to work the phones to find media partners and to keep editors informed about our progress.

Based on our budget line, the Sacramento Bee seemed interested. So did the Orange County Register. The Bakersfield Californian and Stockton Record soon came on board. In addition to showing our methodology to an expert in computer-assisted reporting and statistical analysis, such as Doig, Rosenthal thought we needed to write about our methodology so that readers could understand how the reporting process evolved. Gabrielson banged that out.

He also wrote the text for two data pieces that Armendariz helped put together – one focusing on overtime costs and another looking at the UC Berkeley program that helps administer DUI checkpoint money. 

Working with Gabrielson was a pleasure. It's comforting to an editor when a reporter can quickly answer every question you toss their way. Gabrielson had great command of the subject, and he worked quickly and efficiently to turn around all of our requests. By midday, we were ready to distribute both versions of the story.

Even though we didn't expect any newsroom to publish the full-length story, we made it available in case editors saw things in the longer draft that they wanted in the condensed version. Once the drafts are dispatched to news outlets, we await questions from editors. Because we're almost always dealing with multiple partners, we end up fielding lots of inquiries from copy editors, project editors and managing editors as the week progresses.

When we launched California Watch last fall, I worried that it might be a little overwhelming to have so many layers of editors. We all know what it’s like to have too many cooks trying to season the soup. So far, knock on wood, it has actually worked. And we saw a perfect example of that just a few hours later. Sacramento Bee Projects Editor Amy Pyle suggested tweaking the first paragraph of our story. It made the top better and tighter. We made a couple of other adjustments and added a new fourth paragraph.

This was the new start (You can see how it differs slightly from the budget line):
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.

And this was the added fourth paragraph:
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.

Doig, the Arizona State professor, got back to us and said he was comfortable with our methods. In the meantime, Gabrielson was going through an entirely different editing process with the New York Times. Bergman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize working with the Times, had gotten the newspaper's new Bay Area edition and PBS NewsHour interested months ago.

Gabrielson tailored a tightly focused draft for the Times that contained mostly information about Bay Area checkpoints. And he was going back and forth with editors there about changes to the story. He also prepped for a KQED Radio interview with Michael Montgomery and reviewed final video.

Thursday: La Opinion had begun to translate the story into Spanish. Web production assistant Sarah McHie made sure all our articles and pieces were coming together for our Web site. Pickoff-White produced a cool graphic showing the cities with the highest impound rates. She did this even though she had been laid up in a hospital for two days over the weekend. Now she had been ordered by her doctors to rest at home because she had what appeared to be swine flu. But a little H1N1 wasn't going to stop her.

Gabrielson, meanwhile, headed over to KQED Radio in the morning to tape his radio interview. Later, he watched the NewsHour piece one last time before it got shipped to New York. He also went over the story line-by-line with the New York Times to make more changes to their draft.

Friday: We prepared a Word document with final fixes – just two revised paragraphs that added context in response to a question from Orange County Register Investigative Editor Chris Knap and another from the Sacramento Bee. Through this editing process, the story kept getting stronger.

Some news organizations were still weighing whether to run it. The Modesto Bee told us they would publish the story the following week. The Fresno Bee said they also would like to run it later. Freedberg got back the translated version from La Opinion.

One more time, we all looked over the final pieces that McHie had loaded into our content management system. We rewrote one headline on a graphic, but otherwise everything looked ready. Just as we were leaving the office, we received word that three more Southern California newspapers were interested.

Saturday: Logging in from home, Pickoff-White made sure everything went live at the right time. We posted the stories, charts, graphics and interactive map around 6 p.m.

Our California Watch News Alert went out shortly after, and we started sending out our “tweets” announcing the story. We also posted a link on Facebook. As a small startup, these social media tools are especially important to help spread the word about our work.

The New York Times posted their version early Saturday evening. In the meantime, around the state, several newspaper staffs were getting ready to put the story on their front pages for Sunday. KQED Radio would broadcast an interview with Gabrielson on Monday and the PBS NewsHour would devote a segment to the story Monday night.

Sunday: Finally, an opportunity to exhale – but not all of us. Sarah Terry-Cobo, a freelance journalist who also helps with distribution, scoured the Web for newspaper front pages for our own archives. We also kept pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook. Huffington Post picked up the story, driving thousands of new readers to our site. By the time the day was over, we had shattered our record for the most traffic on californiawatch.org in a single day.

Monday: The cannon goes off again.

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.

We really had no institutional baggage to overcome when we built our California Watch team from scratch. No voices telling us, “You can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not the way we do it here.” We weren’t weighted down by the kind of intractable culture that has made it hard for lots of newsrooms across America to adjust and adapt quickly enough to a fast-changing world.

We have pretty much thrown out the old rule books. Here editors will write and report and – gasp – reporters will edit. And even crazier than that: investigative journalists are blogging – a ton. Our hard-working staff has generated close to 100 blog posts in a little more than three weeks, on top of some kick-ass stories, terrific multimedia and nearly two dozen searchable databases. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video by Mark S. Luckie about our team and mission.

In our first few months of operation, the staff of California Watch has begun to mold its own way of doing things – one that stresses innovation, ideas, and a can-do spirit. We will try new things, and we will occasionally miss the mark, but you can’t move forward without throwing out antiquated, obsolete rules and challenging the way journalists have operated. It’s one of the endearing things in our little newsroom that makes this an absolutely thrilling place to be.

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.

If you're sipping your mocha at a coffee shop somewhere in California on Thursday, keep an ear out for the furious tapping on the keyboard. It could be one of us blogging or tweeting, building multimedia packages or pounding out the next big story.

Members of the California Watch and Center for Investigative Reporting staffs will be fanning out around the state and working in coffee shops with WiFi access on Jan. 21 as part of our first "Open Newsroom."

Here's how the idea came about: For most of this week, our operations are being disrupted by an office move. We’re packing up and transporting the whole shebang from our existing location on Newbury Street to a beautifully remodeled landmark building on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. Our Internet connection went down Friday at our old location, and we don't have a place to sit in the new space. If you're trying to call right now, our phones are unattended, if they're plugged in at all. After the holiday today, we're mostly going to be working from home until Jan. 25 when the doors open at our new digs.

We figured we should turn this temporary inconvenience into an opportunity. So we decided to set up shop on Thursday at various WiFi hotspots.

The Open Newsroom concept is part of a goal to connect with readers and get out of the office. We’re hoping it will be a regular part of what we do. On Thursday, please stop by to say hello. We're looking forward to meeting you. And if you have any great story tips, we'll be there to listen. 

The locations and hours to find us are on the map below.

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.