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A New Twist in Non-Profit Journalism

Posted on Jul 5th, 2009

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

Posted in: California New Media Links, Future of California Newspapers, Newspaper Business, Non-profit journalism.

Negative Reinforcement

Posted on Jun 28th, 2009

It should have been a moment of celebration for whatever gods are still  watching over Sacramento — and for the flawed mortals who inhabit the place. 

When the State Assembly approved $5 billion in further budget cuts this week, it was one of those rare times that the Republicans and Democrats actually agreed on something.   On three bills, they voted by 69-0, 54-0 and 69-0 margins, showing just what is possible on the bipartisanship front. 

So what did Gov. Schwarzenegger do?  He vowed to  veto the bill, insisting that Democrats and Republicans send him a bill that dealt with the entire $24 billion deficit — and then conferred with Senate Republicans who promptly shut down efforts to pass the legislation in the Senate. 

 If there’s logic behind what the governor’s strategy,  it escapes me.  If I were in his shoes (which I’m not obviously ) I would have rushed down to the Capitol, handed out cigars, opened up bottles of champagne, to celebrate this stunningly rare instance of bipartisan comity, and illustration of what is possible — and urged lawmakers to do more to get the job done.

It’s a matter of elementary psychology to reward positive behavior — if only to  encourage more of it in the future. 

The state is now just days away from having to issue IOU’s to a range of state creditors.  ”Failure to act will expose taxpayers to substantial, long-term damage,”  State Treasurer Bill Lockeyr and Controller John Chiang warned.  

In response to the Assembly’s efforts to at least postpone fiscal disaster, Schwarzenegger came back with a plan that would reduce pension benefits on newly hired state employees — which his spokesman acknowledged would do absolutely nothing to resolve the current budget crisis.  (Schwarzenegger’s staff helpfully pointed out it would save the state $74 billion by 2040 —  a mere 31 years from now). 

Schwarzenegger is playing a high stakes game, and 38 million Californians  can only hope that he knows what he is doing.

What is instructive is that there is so little reporting explaining Schwarzenegger’s strategy, and the likelihood of it working.    If a similar train wreck were occurring at a federal level, you can be sure there would have been deep analysis and reporting on what was happening behind the scenes.  But here, out in the California hinterland, the inner workings of Sacramento are, to most Californians, a mystery.   What happened this week made deciphering the Capitol even more so.

Posted in: Schwarzenegger, State Budget.

Brother, Can You Spare 75 Cents?

Posted on Jun 27th, 2009 1 comment

A few days ago I stared at the newspaper racks for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune outside Mama’s Royal Cafe in Oakland where I had just had breakfast. 

I noticed that they were each charging 75c for their daily editions — and $2 for their Sunday editions.

That’s a far cry from the 25c the paper charged when I  first started reading The Chronicle nearly 30 years ago.

The decision to jack up newsstand prices is part of a great new experiment underway among newspapers across the country:    to see just how much newspaper readers will pay at newsstands and newsracks for papers they are subscribing to in declining numbers.

The decision of local and regional papers like the Chronicle and the Tribune to  levy higher newsstand prices follows the same moves made by  major East Coast newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times. As of June 1, the Times raised its daily newsstand price to $2 — and $6 on Sundays out here on the West Coast

To me, it seems like one one of the strangest — and I predict self-defeating — responses to the gloomy financial outlook for newspapers.  Even Clark Hoyt, the Times’ public editor, called the move “risky,” which is an understatement. 

It’s possible  that some readers in California will be willing to insert 4 quarters into a newsrack for a copy of The New York Times, which is still a news-packed product that offers more substance than readers are able to digest at one sitting. 

The opposite is the case with local and regional newspapers that seem to get thinner and thinner with each passing month  - and that readers are turning away from in droves.

Few people have three quarters in their pockets (let alone eight to buy the Sunday editions) — and even fewer will make the effort to find the change.  

If  news racks allowed potential readers to buy their paper by inserting a credit card, for example - like when you rent a baggage cart at airport —  that might — and I emphasize might — yield better results.

But  fewer and fewer people want to buy newspapers in their hard copy versions.  So why would anyone at  corporate headquarters think that aspiring readers would be willing to pay more for them on the street? And during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression?

Raising newsstand prices strikes me as a desperate response to desperate times.  I doubt it will work.  

LOUIS FREEDBERG

Posted in: Future of California Newspapers, Newspaper Business.

Let them mow grass

Posted on Jun 19th, 2009

Gov. Schwarzenegger, once a master of media sophistication (or manipulation, depending on your point of view), seems to be losing his touch.

His biggest talking point these days is that the current budget crisis in California presents all kinds of opportunities to do things better than they have been in the past.

What kinds of opportunities, you might be wondering?

In an interview with San Francisco Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz, Schwarzenegger actually proposed that school kids should be put to work mowing their school grounds as a way to help close the state’s latest deficit — now back up to $24 billion (thats in addition to the $36 billion deficit the Legislature and the Governor have already erased).

Yes, that’s right.   Mow the lawn.

Let me quote directly from Diaz’ column:

“Maybe they can find someone in this crisis who will mow the lawn for free, so the school doesn’t have to lay off a teacher,” Schwarzenegger said. “Maybe the kids would like to mow the lawn, because that’s what we did in Austria and it didn’t hurt me by any means”

“We loved to mow the lawn,” Schwarzenegger said, swinging his arm to explain how they did it with a scythe.

Most schools I know of have little or no grass to mow.   The only green vegetation in my kids’ school (Jefferson Elementary in Berkeley) is a vegetable garden inspired by Alice Water’s edible gardens movement, and a small patch of grass in the middle of a pint-sized track.

Up the road, at King Junior High, there is a larger section of grass in the middle of the track.  But I can’t imagine it would cost more than $100 a month at the most to cut the grass.

And you’d need an industrial size mower to do the job.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable handing one of those over to a junior high student.

OK, our governor must be thinking of high school students mowing playing their playing fields. 

Even it if were feasible (getting over child labor laws, etc. etc.), it would open the district to all kinds of liability issues.

And I doubt the governor has calculated exactly (or even approximately) the state would save if kids mowed the grass.

I’ll concede perhaps our governor was just making a flip remark, just like he did in the old days when he talked about the “girly men” in the Legislature.  But didn’t he learn his lesson?

If President Obama had suggested that school children get out and mow their school lawns as a way to reduce their budget deficits,  he would have been accused of being heartless and opaque.     Within-the-Beltway reporters would have had a fine time with it.   Jon Stewart would have gotten in a few choice routines.

But it is a sign of a weakened press in California that even a celebrity governor like Arnold Schwarzenegger can make such statements with barely any attention being paid to them.

So he continues to make them.   And the state moves closer and closer to financial disaster.

Posted in: California Politics, Schwarzenegger, State Budget.

News Innovation Thrives in San Diego

Posted on Jun 14th, 2009

When it comes to journalism innovation, San Diego may have every other city in the United States beat.

It’s here that new journalism experiments are popping up.    For now, it has two of the liveliest online news engines — in effect competing against each other and the  San Diego Union Tribune, recently sold and dramatically downsized.

Voice of San Diego was the first major media innovation to emerge in 2005.   A non-profit venture. it was initially underwritten by investors led by philanthropist Buzz Woolley and Neil Morgan, the former columnist and edtitor at the UT. It is now arguably the most successful online “newspaper” in the United States (Full Disclosure:  Andrew Donohue, its co-executive editor, is on our advisory board).  

In March this year,  San Diego News Network sprung on the scene, with backing from technology entrepreneur Neil Senturia and his wife Barbara Bry.   It went through major leadership upheavals when publisher and executive editor Ron James, who came up with the idea in the first place, was reportedly  forced out by  Senturia and Bry  within within weeks of its start date.   But SDNN recently named the highly regarded Chris Jennewein,  formerly editor  of  Sign On San Diego, the UT’s on line web site, to be its president, so it may have recovered from its initial stumbles. 

San Diego also has a chain of five newspapers run by the San Diego County Newspaper Group (who are listed as partners of SDNN).  San Diego Newsroom is an online site that focuses on local government that began in October 2008.

What’s going on? Why has San Diego turned into a hub of media innovation?  Andrew Donohue feels that some of it may be because the UT has always been a relatively weak newspaper in the San Diego market.    But the same can be said of newspapers in other California media markets — notably the San Francisco Chronicle — and the Bay Area hasn’t spawned the same level of new journalism innovations. 

But compared to the Chronicle,  the UT has forced out far more journalists, and the upheavals there have been even more severe — creating a pool of journalistic talent that new media innovations have been able to use at relatively low cost. 

The demographic and political transformations that are occurring in San Diego may also explain the lively news environment there. No longer is San Diego the Republican monolith it once was.  Last November,  Democrats outnumbered Republicans on voter rolls for the first time in a quarter century . These more liberal residents may be more open to new media innovations than established long-term residents.  

But all this is speculation.   Your thoughts? 

LOUIS FREEDBERG

Posted in: Future of California Newspapers, Newspaper Business, Non-profit journalism, San Diego Media, Uncategorized.

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