Center for Investigative Reporting, The Bay Citizen explore merger

By CIR Staff | February 7, 2011

The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Bay Citizen agreed today to formally explore a merger, a move that would combine the oldest nonprofit investigative news group in the nation with a startup newsroom focused on the San Francisco Bay Area.

The boards of both organizations signed a memorandum of understanding to begin working out details of merging their two staffs. The deal still has hurdles to clear before a merger can be completed.

Former San Francisco Chronicle Executive Editor Phil Bronstein and CIR’s current executive director, Robert J. Rosenthal, will lead the combined organization.

Bronstein will assume the role of executive chairman of the newly constituted 19-member board of directors. In his new role, a paid position, Bronstein's focus will be on overall strategy and audience engagement. He will emphasize fundraising and developing new ways to sustain the nonprofit.

Bronstein, 61, has served as chairman of the CIR board since January 2011. He played a key role in brokering a potential merger after he was approached to be the next chief executive officer of The Bay Citizen.

“I've been a journalist in the Bay Area my entire adult life and have deep roots and affection for the extraordinary and unique culture here,” Bronstein said. “There is more innovation, activism and civic involvement in this region than anywhere in the country. This is the basis for engaging people where we all live. With our unified nonprofit model, we can bring together combined talent, technology, investigative power and creative skills to serve the public in dynamic ways.”

Jeffrey Ubben, chairman of the The Bay Citizen board, said he is believes the merger “bodes well for an informed and engaged Bay Area.”

“Together, we will draw on the vision and talents of each of our high caliber staffs, and ultimately become stronger and more effective than the sum of our parts,” Ubben said.

As executive director of the combined operation, Rosenthal will oversee day-to-day operations of a staff that will number about 65 people. He also will play a key role in creating a vision for the merged organization.

Rosenthal, 63, joined CIR in 2007 and has guided the nonprofit at a time of unprecedented growth. The editorial operations will report to him.

In 2009, CIR launched California Watch, the largest investigative reporting team in the state. CIR added a video unit last year that has enabled the newsroom to produce stories for print and TV media partners across the country.

“We will now be able to bring our combined strategies for engagement and accountability journalism to a region of the country that can best embrace it,” Rosenthal said.

The addition of The Bay Citizen would give CIR its first local reporting hub and an expanded technology team to create reporting apps and tools around data, Rosenthal said. Though just two years old, The Bay Citizen has developed a loyal membership. The Bay Citizen also brings with it a solid fundraising base as the merged nonprofit attempts to develop revenue strategies that will help make it sustainable.

The Bay Citizen will continue to produce local and regional enterprise reporting, Rosenthal said, and California Watch will continue to produce statewide stories. CIR’s reporters, meanwhile, generate national and international investigations. But Rosenthal noted that some CIR stories can be localized for The Bay Citizen’s audiences, and some local stories can be broadened in scope.

“Because it's the Bay Area, stories we do here will also be of interest to audiences across the country and around the world,” Rosenthal said.

The 35-year-old Center for Investigative Reporting has grown rapidly – from a small newsroom with about a $2.3 million budget three years ago to a $5 million news organization. CIR has produced stories for some of the most recognizable news brands in the country, including Frontline, PBS NEWSHOUR, “60 Minutes,” The Washington Post and Newsweek. California Watch has boosted CIR’s distribution to include hundreds of news outlets in California.

Both boards met over the weekend to negotiate terms of the memorandum of understanding. While most Americans watched the Super Bowl, merger attorneys and board members hammered out details. By late Monday, only a few issues remained, including whether The Bay Citizen and CIR would issue separate press releases about the formal merger talks. (It was decided to do one joint release.)

The combined budgets of the two organizations add up to more than $10 million. A final budget target has not been announced. A small transition team from CIR and The Bay Citizen will begin working on the fine details of merging the two operations, including developing a business plan and building an organizational chart. The transition is expected to take several weeks. During that time, the newsrooms will continue to run independently.

Rosenthal said Mark Katches, CIR’s editorial director, will play a crucial role in determining the merged organization’s editorial strategies.

Katches, 48, has edited two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting projects and three Pulitzer finalists in the last eight years. CIR hired him in 2009 to build California Watch. He was promoted to editorial director for all of CIR last April.

“Much of the success of CIR and California Watch is directly attributed to Mark’s skills as an editor and as a visionary entrepreneur,” Rosenthal said. “We are both looking forward to working with The Bay Citizen and its staff to create a very special organization.”

Combining the two newsrooms will present challenges. Through its California Watch operation, CIR has forged relationships with local media partners like the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. In contrast, The Bay Citizen has positioned itself as a competitor to the Chronicle, and it produces stories every Friday and Sunday for The New York Times’ regional pages, also a competitor of the Chronicle and other Bay Area news outlets.

Another delicate issue to resolve: The Bay Citizen newsroom staff has voted to join the local newsroom union. The larger CIR newsroom staff is not part of a union. Other questions remain about The Bay Citizen’s focus and mission – which has included culture and sports coverage – and how that will mesh with CIR, which is known for deeper-dive investigative and explanatory reporting. The merger must be approved by the California attorney general’s office.

The deal comes at a critical time for The Bay Citizen. In September, its first editor, Jonathan Weber, announced he was leaving after 16 months at the helm. In October, Chief Executive Officer Lisa Frazier tendered her resignation. Her last day was Monday.

In December, founder Warren Hellman died. And in January, The Bay Citizen’s interim editor, Steve Fainaru, announced plans to leave.

Of all the changes in leadership, Hellman’s death perhaps left the biggest void. The banjo-picking billionaire founded The Bay Citizen with $5 million in seed money in 2009. He recruited close friends to contribute millions more to the organization. His death will pose fundraising challenges for the merged organization.

Hellman created The Bay Citizen out of concern that strong local reporting had diminished due to severe cuts at the San Francisco Chronicle and other local news outlets.

How the two staffs come together will be closely watched, according to Bay Area-based media industry analyst Ken Doctor.

“In the short term, it's a vote of confidence in the California Watch model, one with more ramping revenue streams and partnerships than a purely local model,” Doctor said. “If it works, 49 other states will be watching.”

Rosenthal said he is looking forward to working closely with Bronstein.

"At CIR, Phil has been a terrific chair the last year, and since I joined the organization, he has been highly supportive of me,” Rosenthal said. “The CIR board knew of my vision when I joined the organization. I have had tremendous freedom and support in implementing that vision. They have understood the challenges we faced and allowed me to take risks and follow my instincts in a way that was almost impossible in a corporate, traditional setting. I know that will continue as we move forward. This is a huge challenge, not without risks, but it is going to be fun for all of us to be part of building a truly unique, special and important public service news organization."

KQED-FM Today: Bay Area News

Today's program on KQED Forum:

The Bay Area News Group announced yesterday it will consolidate its 11 daily East Bay newspapers and eliminate 120 jobs. With advancements in digital technology, news organizations are increasingly veering away from traditional print journalism. We discuss the state of Bay Area journalism in the digital age.

Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

Alan Mutter, media consultant and former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle
David Weir, veteran journalist, former executive at KQED and journalism professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford
Ken Doctor, news industry analyst for Outsell and author of "Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get"
Mac Tully, president and publisher of the Bay Area News Group


Audio Link: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201108241000

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It's been sixty-six years since the U.S. military dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, in the process ending World War II, by destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing massive number of civilians in the process.

An official military photographer named Joe O'Donnell, was the first cameraman to visit the devastated cities after the bombs' mushroom clouds dissipated into the skies above a defeated Japan.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Joe O'Donnell's son, Tyge, about the work his Dad did and how the photographs he took can help us all try to comprehend the long-lasting impacts of these incomprehensible, and unprecedented events.

Portions of this interview are now published, for the first time, to my knowledge, anywhere, as part of a video created by Tyge at YouTube.



Here is where you can find additional information about Joe O'Donnell, from Tyge O'Donnell's site.

Salon Founder David Talbot Returns to the Helm on Interim Basis

According to an 8'K filing with the SEC:

"On July 7, 2011, Salon Media Group, Inc. (the “Company”) appointed David Talbot, a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, as interim chief executive officer (CEO) of the Company succeeding Mr. Richard Gingras who resigned from his position as the CEO and Director of the Company on June 21, 2011, effective as of July 8, 2011. Mr. Talbot will serve as the Company’s CEO until the Company completes the process of hiring a longer term CEO.

"Mr. Talbot has not entered into a written agreement with the Company and the terms of his compensation for his service are not yet subject to mutual agreement. The Company will disclose the terms of Mr. Talbot’s compensation arrangements as interim CEO once they have been finalized.

"Mr. Talbot, age 59, served as the Company’s CEO from 1995 through April 1999 and again from October 2003 through February 2005. He was the Chairman of the Board of Directors from April 1999 through December 2006. He served as Editor-in-Chief from the Company’s incorporation in 1995 through February 2005. More recently, Mr. Talbot has been an author of books and articles for numerous publications including Time, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Additionally, in July 2007, Mr. Talbot joined Fenton Communications as a Senior Vice President and, in 2008, he co-founded a media company, The Talbot Players, which produces books, documentaries and TV series. Mr. Talbot holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz."

Google Subpoenaed by FTC

According to its 8-K just filed with the SEC, Google has received a subpoena from the FTC, indicating that an antitrust investigation is going forward:

On June 23, 2011, Google Inc. received a subpoena and a notice of civil investigative demand from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) relating to a review by the FTC of Google’s business practices, including search and advertising. Google is cooperating with the FTC on this investigation.





GOOGLE INC.

Date: June 24, 2011

/s/ Kent Walker


Kent Walker

Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Salon CEO Gingras Resigns

According to an 8-K filing with the SEC,

"On June 21, 2011, Mr. Richard Gingras resigned from his position as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Salon Media Group, Inc. (the “Company”), effective as of July 8, 2011. Mr. Gingras is resigning to accept a position at another company. Mr. Gingras’ resignation was not related to any disagreement or dispute with the Company’s management or the other members of the Board of Directors of the Company. We anticipate that the Board of Directors of the Company will appoint a successor to Mr. Gingras’ offices in the near future."

An App to Help You Find a Parking Place (But You Still Need to Figure Out How to Parallel Park On Your Own)

The current tech boom is driven partly by location-based apps over mobile devices, or what you might call a Lomo push that employs a lot of coders in Somo and elsewhere around San Francisco.

And the City itself recently decided to join the party by releasing its SFpark, an iPhone, iPod, and iPad app designed to help you find parking places on the streets or in the city's parking garages.

Early reviews from users were decidedly mixed.

"It works at last, and is phenomenal. Surprisingly it maps everywhere I need, and is completely accurate," says mhlester on the city's website.

"It crashes the phone and makes it reboot every time I try to launch it," writes Editthisdghyxdsddjvnjk.

Weswag reports: "Crashes repeatedly, so I wasn't able to even see if it helped me find a parking space. I have serious doubts, however. In my experience living in SF for many years, parking spaces on the street in highly congested areas remained open only briefly, and the only way to snag one was to spot people getting into their cars to leave. The info re this app stated that there was a one-minute delay before the data about an empty space was uploaded to the server. Parking spaces are long gone in that amount of time."

According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, "San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with."

The app depends on a network of wireless sensors that have been embedded in streets and city garages. These sensors report if a spot has opened up.

Hmmm. I guess one thing that is worrisome about this otherwise very cool-sounding project is that many drivers already seem dangerously distracted while talking on their phones or texting while driving.

So couldn't it be somehow integrated into your car's GPS system?

Or, better yet, all of these new digital that are making their way into our cars suggest to me that it's time to take a serious look at Stanford researcher Sebastian Thrun's self-driving car.

By doing as Thrun has proven can be done, and inserting robotics into our vehicles, we could probably substantially reduce the hazards of auto accidents caused by human error -- which are the cause of the overwhelming majority of such accidents, of course.

But I wonder when and if Americans, with our oft-cited "love of the automobile" and our romantic image of taking roadtrips on the open highway, will ever be able to turn the wheel over to a technology that can handle these tasks better than we can.

Of course, one would expect there to be robot errors, from time to time, and this brings up another characteristic that seems deeply ingrained in our culture -- fear of robotic technologies.

Just think of all the books and movies from iRobot to Battlestar Galactica, that are predicated on our fears, and then try to find some with a more hopeful approach?

But to bring it all back to this week's news, SFpark, I can't help but wonder whether most people around here might be happy to at least turn the vexing task of parallel parking on hilly, crowded city streets over to a robot perfectly programmed to execute this maneuver successfully every single time.

A combination of these technologies might even eventually revive those happy-face smiles on the models playing families on road trips back in the 1950s.

Then again, there might arise a new threat -- robot road rage...but I'm sure that someone in the world of sci-fi has already imagined that one, too.

Thank you to Louis Rossetto for suggesting that I look into robotics and Thrun's self-driving car.