San Diego continues to reinforce its status as a leading force in news innovation.
Platinum Equity, the equity firm that bought the San Diego Union Tribune last month, is funding an investigative reporting initiative, The Watchdog Institute. The non-profit inititative will be run by none other than Lori Hearn, who until this week as senior editor for Watchdog Journalism at the U-T.
At a time when most newspaper owners are cutting staff (and the past and current owners of the UT are no exception), funding one of their own reporters to set up an independent investigative reporting operation to supply them with content is a first. The new venture will be based at San Diego State University, Hearn told me at Pocantico, the Rockefeller estate outside New York where we are both attending a conference on investigative journalism.
Hearn is a veteran reporter at the U-T, which was experienced radical downsizing in recent years. Its 400 strong newsroom has been cut in half over the last three years alone. Hearn tells me that she has received funding for two years to support two reporters. The primary client will be the U-T itself — but after articles have appeared in the paper, other news outlets may also use the material the project produces, Hearn says.
It is of course possible that the Union Tribune planned to eliminate their investigative unit — and the new spinoff that its new owners are supporting is just a graceful way to shut it down.
Still, the arrangement is still more expensive than a typical buyout would have cost — and it does mean that there will be some dedicated investigative reporting in San Diego for the next two years at least.
Among the other news innovations that have emerged in San Diego are Voice of San Diego, the online “newspaper as well as San Diego News Network.
What is a emerging in San Diego is a lively new journalism ecosystem (to borrow a term used by Chuck Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the main drafter of the Pocantico Declaration, of which more later). Whether it’s component parts will endure in the future is of course an open question, but for now it is charting new directions that are exceedingly interesting to watch.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
