I got about a dozen e-mails within hours of the publication of a great story on the front page of The New York Times on Tuesday, "Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs." Reporter Richard Pérez Peña highlighted our friends at Voice of San Diego, and examined other projects in Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and New Haven, Conn. These are all promising developments, even if most of them are dependent on philanthropic aid and chronically under-funded so far. This is just a piece of what we hope to accomplish for San Francisco.
There are actually a great many more of these local news sites, which employ actual reporters, uphold the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics and cast themselves as a potential step toward an answer of what to do if the establishment press collapses. That threat came a step closer last week, when a Connecticut newspaper chain said it would close two papers by January if it didn’t find a buyer.
In addition to staff cutbacks at nearly every Bay Area daily, due largely to the plummeting print advertising market, one paper targeting the black community in San Francisco, the Bay View, stopped printing over the summer. It still has a Web site, but the end of its print run makes it harder for a segment of the community with limited access to the Web to get its news.
