As the year comes to an end, we would like to take you behind the scenes of the San Francisco Public Press and introduce you to the editors, reporters, photographers and others working together to dig up unheralded local stories in the public interest.
We can’t do this work without your support. Please donate to the Public Press during our end-of-year fundraising drive.
Michael Stoll, Executive Director
 |
Why did you start the Public Press?
The inspiration came from the deterioration in local news media that a lot of colleagues and I saw in the late 2000s, due to corporate consolidation and the loss of advertising revenue to the internet. No one had thought to combine the newspaper subscription model and the public broadcasting “pledge” model, so we officially began our endeavor in March of 2009 with a grant from the San Francisco Foundation. We launched the print edition just over a year after that.
What makes the coverage in the Public Press different?
We’ve done stories about local development and the problems of overspending on capital projects resulting from political interference — like the Bay Bridge report from 2009 and the Treasure Island package from 2010.
The just-published Healthy San Francisco reporting project is a great example of how a small independent news organization can take a deeper look at a very big local program than any of the mainstream news media have done before.
What is the benefit of your ad-free model for news?
We can do journalism more independently. In our first edition, we investigated dubious sales practices in the gem department of Macy’s, something that is unlikely to receive a lot of attention in a commercial newspaper.
The in-depth story on the payday loan industry, published in the Winter 2011 print edition, is another great example of business coverage not from the perspective of people who invest in businesses, but from that of average consumers. That’s not the approach that the business page of a daily newspaper usually takes.
What is the biggest challenge that the organization faces?
Money to bring readers more and better independent reporting. We currently have bigger ambitions than resources. We have more than 75 active freelance contributors, volunteers and interns, and a larger network of supporters across the Bay Area. We would love to be able to pay our staff competitive freelance rates and publish both the paper and the website more frequently.
What can we expect from the Public Press in 2012?
We are already developing two big collaborative reporting projects for the next two issues, and we hope to roll out additional reporting on the low-income finance industry, environment, transportation, and housing and homelessness. Our dream is to increase frequency of the publication to monthly by the end of next year.
_________
Will you help Michael bring serious, independent news back to San Francisco? Memberships start at $35 for one year. Contributions of all sizes are welcome, and are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Please become a member today.
