Submitted by Michael Stoll on Wed, 02/15/2012 - 17:36
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: WEDNESDAY FEB. 15, 2012
CONTACT:
Michael Stoll, executive director
Lila LaHood, publisher
(415) 495-7377, news (AT) sfpublicpress (DOT) org
UNEVEN FIGHT AGAINST HUMAN TRAFFICKING — SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS ISSUE #6
SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area’s battle against the scourge of human trafficking has been hampered by state inaction because of budget cuts and internal competition among an array of local law enforcement agencies and nonprofits that work on the issue. As a result, some counties arrest hundreds of traffickers and some hardly any; and victim services providers often have strained relations with the police.
Those are among the findings of a team reporting project in the Spring 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press, hitting newsstands on Feb. 15. Stories will also be rolled out at sfpublicpress.org/trafficking over the following two weeks. This issue features a 10,000-word special section on human trafficking produced in collaboration with New America Media and the San Francisco bilingual newspaper El Tecolote.
Stories in the package, to go online through Feb. 23, explain why a 2005 California law that made trafficking illegal fell far short of the criminal punishments imposed by other states, and why a citizen initiative is trying to amend that law on the November ballot. Another story, produced by New America Media, explains why the current reform stems back 10 years to the horrific Berkeley “sex slavery” case, in which a wealthy abuser got only eight years in prison and is now free.
The Spring 2012 print issue also features stories about the Healthy San Francisco universal health care program, and how its future could be drastically changed by President Obama’s national health initiative. The issue also tackles the peril facing community gardens in the Bayview, ranked-choice voting and the transit chaos anticipated during the America’s Cup races.
In addition to its own independent, nonpartisan reporting, the Public Press brings quality reporting from other nonprofit media to new audiences. Also in the newspaper are articles and radio transcripts from more than a dozen local public-media and civic organizations, including KQED, KALW, California Watch, Bay Nature and Oakland Local.
The San Francisco Public Press was launched online in 2009 and in print in 2010. Its mission is to enrich civic life in San Francisco by delivering public-interest journalism to broad and diverse audiences through print and interactive media not supported by advertising.
The Public Press receives major funding from the San Francisco Foundation, and has received financial support from KQED, the Center for Public Integrity, the California Endowment and more than 500 individual donors. A one-year membership starts at $35. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. The Public Press is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media of San Francisco, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
Four years ago, the city launched Healthy San Francisco, a pioneering plan to bring universal health care to residents through a network of community clinics and hospitals. Though the program has earned rave reviews for the quality of care and expanding access to thousands of the uninsured, the city is not immune to the national pressures of skyrocketing health care costs.
In an election year in which health reform is on the political front burner, what lessons can the nation learn from San Francisco’s experiment? Will preventive care save or cost more money in the long run? What are the potential long-term policy implications for patients and health care providers? What other cities might have the answers?
Hear diverse perspectives from a distinguished panel of public health planners, care providers, patients and journalists — and share your own health care experiences.
Admission is free. Healthy snacks and beverages will be provided. The facility is wheelchair accessible.
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Sun, 01/15/2012 - 14:54
This is a repost of a blog item for Reporting on Health, the website of the USC Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, which supported the Public Press’ Healthy San Francisco reporting project this winter.
In 2007, San Francisco embarked on a rare and bold experiment, resolving to provide universal health care to its residents. The premise was simple — take an existing local safety-net system of clinics and hospitals and transform it by tracking all patients in one database and giving each patient a medical “home.” The approach, aspects of which are being rolled out in communities across the country, promises to reduce cost, increase quality of care and expand the number of uninsured people covered.
Four years later, many of the goals of the program, Healthy San Francisco, have been met. Over time, more than 100,000 previously uninsured people have been covered. The current enrollment of 54,000 people is anywhere between half and three-quarters of the estimated uninsured population in the city.
But to do so, the city’s Department of Public Health has dug deep into its general fund at a time when most of the other departments in the city have had to cut back. And it has earned less than expected from other sources — payments from low-income patients and a newly created business fee. A $27 million federal government grant expired in July, so the city will have to look for alternative funding sources. The city’s baseline safety net expenditures of about $100 million annually have been wrapped into the $177 million budgeted for the program, and with medical costs rising every year, that liability is expected to continue to grow much faster than inflation.
The big question confronting this ambitious program: can it be sustained financially?
The short answer, after a three-month investigation: yes — but only if the economy picks up, federal grants continue to flow and businesses stop fighting health care mandates.
(Left: Patient medical records are still kept on paper at the Chinatown Public Health Clinic. Photo by Jason Winshell/SF Public Press)
The San Francisco Public Press, which covers public policy in the city and across the region on its website and in a quarterly broadsheet newspaper, decided to go in depth to address this fundamental problem. Coverage of this massive health care program has been nearly absent from the mainstream media outlets. The most in-depth piece about the program was a story in San Francisco Magazine more than a year ago, discussing mostly the program’s promise, before it had much of a track record. Recent coverage in the two daily papers, two weeklies and broadcast media focused almost entirely on a current controversy about health fees levied on businesses, but not on the macroeconomic picture of the program.
With a USC Annenberg/California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship starting last spring, we were able to focus on Healthy San Francisco’s financial sustainability. The rising cost of health care has dominated headlines for years and is one of the key points of political contention between the major parties in Washington. We wanted to examine up close a promising local initiative that could, perhaps, inform the national discussion and trim some of the billions wasted in the current medical care business model. We also wanted to explore what its services have meant to the health of city residents.
The resulting project: “Healthy San Francisco: Who Pays?” was a special four-page section in the Winter 2011 edition of the print newspaper. Three reporters, two photographers and a graphic designer contributed to the research, interviewing the director of the program, clinic directors, technology specialists, medical staff, independent experts and dozens of patients. They visited nearly a third of the medical clinics and hospitals in the Healthy San Francisco network and discovered some compelling trends:
— While the program has succeeded at providing something like health insurance to tens of thousands of people who never had access to that level of care, without taking into account pre-existing conditions, most of the patients are poor — below 200 percent of the official poverty level. As a result their contributions are millions of dollars below the planners’ initial projections.
— The requirement that medium-size and large businesses pay for the program by giving some level of coverage to their employees, including an option for medical savings accounts and direct contributions to Healthy San Francisco, the program has brought in less money than projected.
— Some businesses are exploiting a loophole in the law to drain unused funds at the end of the year. And there is evidence that some businesses, after initially complying with the law, are lately dropping private insurance in favor of reimbursement plans that are much cheaper. They also leave patients not fully insured.
— Healthy San Francisco appears to be a big bargain, with the average cost of care calculated at $276 per person per month. That compares with an average of $402 for private insurance. But the accounting does not include millions of dollars that clinics and hospitals have had to absorb to care for the additional patient load and technology upgrades to make the system function efficiently.
— Federal grants to spur innovation in health care helped get the program off the ground but may not be renewed, especially if political winds change direction. And while the program was intended to be a bridge to national reform efforts, those programs now face challenges in Congress and the courts.
We published the stories in the print edition Nov. 16, and online later in the week. The response has been very encouraging. In the following weeks the series of four articles has received several thousand hits on the website and has contributed to a marked uptick in purchases of the newspaper, which sells for $1 at about 50 retail locations. The story has been Facebooked, tweeted and retweeted more than 1,000 times. Copies were dropped off at the offices of every city supervisor, the mayor and the Department of Public Health, where we have yet to receive an official response.
We have, however gotten ideas for follow-up stories through social media. The point of this project wasnot to produce a package of stories in one lump and then move on. The reporters all say that they have deepened their understanding of health reporting and want to do more. Their laboratory will be follow-up stories on this program and its evolution over time through the Public Press. We are hoping to engage user of the program especially however they can best interact with journalists — online and offline.
One reader wrote in response to a beautiful half-page graphic (left) by Tom Guffey — showing the growing costs of the program and demographic information — that mental-health spending appears to have shrunk as a proportion of the public health budget. We intend to investigate.
Also our lead reporter, Barbara Grady, got a cache of documents from the city indicating which companies had reduced their private insurance offerings. We plan to do follow-up articles on this, as well new reporting by Angela Hart on new budget information — public records that clinic directors should have shared with us months ago. We expect to find several million dollars in extra cost for technology that is not part of the official $177 million tally for the program.
We are planning a live event in in January in collaboration with the Bay Area chapter of the Association of Health Care Journalists to get responses from patients, doctors and the general public to our stories and get ideas for follow-up coverage. Reporter Kyung Jin Lee is developing a produced audio story for public broadcasting that uses the extensive recordings we did with a wide variety of sources.
The fellowship was helpful to us in three concrete ways.
First, senior fellow Frank Bass helped us break down the demographics of San Francisco by studying recent U.S. Census data. This helped not only this project but also other reporting on a wide array of stories, indicating neighborhood by neighborhood information on where we would expect to find health problems on a local level. The data show income levels by census tract. Even though one survey asks health insurance status, this information is not asked frequently enough for us to get meaningful neighborhood statistics.
Second, the fellowship helped us moderate the ambition of our project, which still took six months to assemble. We couldn’t report on the quality of care for any of the thousands of medical conditions treated through the system. We were also planning to spend a few weeks hanging out at the San Francisco General Hospital emergency room to observe and interview uninsured patients as they were admitted for non-emergency conditions. It is Healthy San Francisco’s contention that the program has significantly reduced emergency room visits by catching problems earlier and diverting them to clinics, saving money. Healthy San Francisco has produced numbers to suggest that these savings are significant, but the statistics are difficult to interpret because individual health cannot be tracked if tens of thousands of people enroll and disenroll every year.
Third, it helped us focus. Finance remained our main concern — the potential savings notwithstanding, in part because of the unique nature of San Francisco’s foray into health coverage. There are a number of localities — states, cities and counties — rolling out their own universal care programs. Massachusetts and Vermont have the most ambitious, but San Francisco’s approach of tweaking an already robust safety-net clinic system makes it the first major American city to take this route.
Third, the $2,000 stipend that came with the fellowship allowed us to pay decent freelance fees to experienced journalists who could afford to spend the time to do significant shoe leather reporting. We supplemented this with $537 in extra donations earned through a pitch to readers through the online journalism micro-funding website Spot.Us. We hope that our careful but high-impact local reporting on a complex issue, supported by the USC Annenberg California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, will pave the way for future funding from foundations and individuals for similar projects and even an ongoing health care beat.
P.S. Like all the participants in my cohort of the Health Journalism Fellowships, the San Francisco Public Press is part of an explosion of startup experimental local news organizations attempting to address shortfalls in serious news coverage as news organizations across the country cut back. The Public Press is nonprofit and noncommercial. We do not accept advertising. We relying on foundation grants (such as The California Endowment’s), syndication, micro-funding, newspaper sales ($1 retail) and the generous support of hundreds of individuals who have donated through our membership program, which is based on the public broadcasting pledge model. Basic memberships start at $35 a year, which entitles you to mailed copies of the newspaper for a year and discounted or free entry to events. Send us $50 and you also get a vermillion SF Public Press branded T-shirt. We are doing a shameless pledge drive because it is necessary to support independent, professional local reporting on topics not covered by the mainstream press. If you’re moved to help out, please contribute!
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Mon, 12/26/2011 - 13:50
We've had a great response to our fundraising drive so far, but we still need your help to reach our $6,000 goal. Our board of directors will match donations up to $3,000 til the end of the year. One more week!
Please support independent public media in San Francisco by becoming a member today.
Our first intern, Ambika Kandasamy, shares her perspective on working in a nonprofit newsroom
How did you get involved with the Public Press?
I joined the organization in February 2009 as an editorial intern. At the time, I was a student at Boston University, working on my master’s degree in journalism. I moved to the Bay Area to finish up my final projects and was looking for opportunities to gain reporting experience and internship credit.
How have you grown within the organization?
I returned to the Public Press less than a year after my internship ended, and I've been writing for the website and print editions since then. I worked on the San Francisco Bay Area Journalist Census project as a researcher. Most recently, I’ve been working as a partnerships editor — curating stories from our news partners like Mission Local, KQED News, California Watch, El Tecolote and other news and civic groups.
How is the Public Press helpful for young reporters?
It’s a great place for young reporters to grow intellectually. The editors offer much support to all reporters, but especially to those who are just starting out in the field.
Most Public Press stories are tied to larger policy issues and require a significant amount of research and reporting. There’s also a strong emphasis on original reporting — we publish stories that aren't getting much attention in mainstream news outlets. That kind of reporting builds a solid foundation in journalism.
What do you enjoy most about working here?
The staff is wonderful. I also love working on the print editions. I graduated at a time when traditional print journalism was sort of disintegrating, and being able to work on our quarterly newspaper has been an exciting opportunity to learn about the print medium. Our ad-free model gives us space to experiment with the design, layout and graphics of the print editions, which is quite fun.
Why should people support the Public Press?
At our news meetings, we find that we always have a surplus of great story ideas, and though we’re able to tackle many of them, there are some stories that we have to push aside simply because we don’t have the funding to pay journalists to pursue them.
Also, we would love to supplement more of our stories with multimedia. Additional funding through memberships, donations and grants would help us buy cameras, editing software, computers and other technological tools.
Your donation will help the Public Press build a more robust newsroom to cover under-reported stories in San Francisco and beyond. Consider making a year-end donation today.
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Thu, 10/20/2011 - 14:35
UPDATE: Thank you to all the supporters who donated to see these stories published! The report was published in the Winter 2011 edition of the Public Press. Read more: http://sfpublicpress.org/news/healthy-sf
__________________
Could San Francisco have figured out a model for providing universal health care on a tight budget?
The city recently launched a grand experiment, stringing together a bare-bones community clinic network and a county hospital into an ersatz universal health care program.
Local officials claim to be saving millions of dollars through coordination, prevention and digital medical records. If the program pencils out as promised in San Francisco, it might be a model for the nation or other cities. Gavin Newsom, who ascended from San Francisco’s mayor to lieutenant governor, made such promises, but he left the city in January. Now the Department of Public Health is working hard to reduce costs and improve health outcomes.
Healthy San Francisco was designed to bring health care to San Francisco’s estimated 73,000 uninsured adults. Two years later, at least two-thirds of them — or 54,000 people — had enrolled, and the system was delivering health care at a cost of $126 million.
The city deems the program a success as measured in social equity. But there has been little analysis of cost savings. No media outlet has thoroughly reported whether Healthy San Francisco is a better financial bet than the former patchwork of private insurers and public hospital emergency rooms covering the medical emergencies of the uninsured.
At a time when federal health care reform is under attack — with Congressional Republicans threatening to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, and 28 states challenging it in court — we need to take a closer look at whether a local version of universal health care is cost effective. Congressional opponents of the federal system are most concerned about cost, claiming that the new law will balloon the deficit. States argue that the federal law violates their sovereignty and that of its citizens.
A close examination of the finances and cost-effectiveness of Healthy San Francisco would be welcome reading for anyone interested in the future of health care in the U.S. Our story also will provide lessons for other municipalities and states considering how to address health care access shortages at a time of squeezed budgets and rising costs.
We are developing a data-driven story examining the cost effectiveness of Healthy San Francisco and laying out the context of past efforts to include those who lacked health coverage. We will find out how much is being spent, how much is being saved, and by whom and what trend lines can be expected (as a whole and on a per capita basis). We’ll also assess the costs to medical practitioners, users and hospitals.
Qualifications
We've assembled a team of four experienced reporters, a photographer, a graphic designer and a social media expert to tackle the story from the angles of changing medical records technology, preventive medicine and emergency room costs.
Barbara Grady is a veteran reporter who has written for Reuters, the Oakland Tribune, MSNBC.com, Oakland Local, Patch, Business 2.0 magazine and various nonprofits in addition to SF Public Press. She was a 2009 recipient of a national "excellence in journalism" award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Reporter Kyung Jin Lee is an editor at the National Radio Project, and has written freelance stories for a wide array of local and national publications.
Angela Hart is a longtime reporter for the San Francisco Public Press who has written about media, development and the San Francisco budget. She is the editor of Rohnert Park Patch.
Alice Joy is a former reporter for the Hollister Free-Lance, where she focused on education and health.
Jason Winshell is photo editor for the Public Press.
Tom Guffey is design director for the Public Press.
Ambika Kandasamy is a Public Press reporter focusing on social media engagement through Facebook, Twitter and other tools.
Deliverables
The San Francisco Public Press is developing a package of in-depth stories covering the Healthy San Francisco program from multiple angles. The stories, interviews and photos will be the centerpiece of the winter 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press — a local nonprofit, noncommercial startup news organization.
We are working with various public-media and civic partners to magnify the reach of this story. We are working to develop a public discussion in San Francisco this fall based on our project, and have plans to turn the reporting into a polished radio story to air on a local or statewide public broadcaster.
We are planning to use SFPublicPress.org to host audio interviews with a wide range of formerly uninsured users of the system to ask: Is Healthy San Francisco affordable to you? Are you getting the care you deserve?Could San Francisco have figured out the model for providing universal health care on a budget?
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Wed, 08/24/2011 - 13:40
There are promising media startups all over the Bay Area, and one experiment in high-quality photography is based in San Francisco and launches today.
It’s an iPad app called Once Magazine, and it’s founded by our very own Jackson Solway, who designed the first print edition of the Public Press last year and also directed photography for local publisher McSweeney’s on its 2009 San Francisco Panorama newspaper project.
Solway has been slaving away with a handful of ultrabright colleagues in the company’s sparse Dogpatch headquarters focused on creating what they say is a first — an app for the iPad that takes photojournalism to a new level by giving it the attention and design sensibility it deserves. There are many undereployed but brilliantly talented photographers out there with too few paying outlets.
Once Magazine is unique in that it relies mostly on app sales through iTunes, so you know it will be very attentive to the response it gets from its audience. There are other players ostensibly in the field, including the Guardian in the UK and National Geographic, but none that we know of with the kind of focus of Once.
The idea is simple, Solway explained in a recent chat: Gather the best photojournalists from around the world and display a rotating gallery of narrative photography shot with a journalistic sensibility — telling a story about a subject somewhere in the world that could be thought of as news, with short well-edited summaries and some multimedia add-ons.
We think it’s a promising model, and one that deserves immediate downloading by anyone with an iPad. Check it out: http://bit.ly/p8n4q6. The first issue is free. Next month’s issue is $2.99. Makes me want to run out and join the iPaderati.
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The launch was a silver lining of sorts that came a day after the Bay Area News Group announced that it would “improve” its coverage by consolidating more than a dozen newspapers that are already owned by one mega Denver-based company into three newspaper titles — leading to “efficiencies” that would allow the MediaNews group to lay off about 120 people. Oh happy day. Except for residents of the East Bay and the Peninsula, who will lose the venerable centenarian mastheads of the Oakland Tribune and the San Mateo County Times.
In the spring 2011 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press we focused on the woes of the downsizing commercial press over the last 10 years. As contributor David Weir wrote, the picture for a robust Fourth Estate may appear grim with the layoff of hundreds of local journalists, particularly in newspapers, but there are about 5,000 media startups right now in and around San Francisco working hard to shake things up — mostly through new platforms and novel technologies. San Francisco, meet Once Magazine.
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Mon, 08/15/2011 - 17:55
KQED Public Media is partnering with the San Francisco Public Press and three other Bay Area nonprofit news organizations to share news stories on the radio and online. The project, called “Networked Journalism,” is an initiative incubated by J Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
We are thrilled that KQED, the largest public broadcaster in the region, is reaching out to startup news organizations such as the Public Press that are expanding the definition of public media. We have gotten coverage of this partnership and congratulations from all across the country, including Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard and the magazine of the public broadcasting industry, Current.
We think this will help position the Public Press as a leader in public media locally as we seek funding, public attention and future collaborations. KQED will be featuring our reporters on air on a regular basis in short radio “debriefs” about our stories. We don’t typically do breaking news, but original stories that explain the context of the news. This emphasis on news partnerships is a great follow-up to KQED’s recent emphasis on shoring up its own newsroom operations, hiring more journalists and scheduling additional time on the air for local news.
We are very heartened that KQED has come to see us as a reliable and professional news source in the two years we have been in operation. Our coverage complements the kind of stories aired on KQED. We are focused on San Francisco-specific stories that no one else is covering — particularly those that address the concerns of under-served audiences. In addition to explaining how the San Francisco budget affects social services and other government programs, the centerpiece package of our latest print edition, we also cover public transportation, housing and homelessness, the nonprofit sector and “low finance” — the ways working people get access to capital.
The San Francisco Public Press published its fourth ad-free print newspaper edition last week, an issue that included an edited transcript of an episode of the KQED Radio program “Forum” with Michael Krasny. We have worked with more than 20 nonprofit news and civic affairs organizations over the past year to provide a print hub that pulls the best from local public media. We look forward to working more closely with KQED to shore up this mutually beneficial cross-fertilization.
The press statement by KQED:
* * *
For Immediate Release
Contact: Ian Hill
Tel: 415.553.2216, ihill [AT] kqed.org
KQED Launches Groundbreaking Partnership for News
Country’s most-listened-to public radio station collaborating with several independent local news outlets
San Francisco, August 10, 2011— KQED has become the first public media organization in the country to join a groundbreaking national program that connects broadcast and print news outlets with local online-first news organizations. The innovative collaboration highlights both the increased importance of blogs when it comes to producing community news and KQED’s commitment to providing Bay Area residents with a diverse array of news and information.
Through the Networked Journalism program, KQED is working with the Bay Area news organizations Berkeleyside (berkeleyside.com), Oakland Local (oaklandlocal.com), NeighborWebSJ (neighborwebsj.com), and the San Francisco Public Press (sfpublicpress.org). Each organization’s posts can be read on KQEDnews.org, covering topics ranging from city council meetings and crime to community fairs and transportation issues. Staffers from organizations collaborating with KQED also are contributing to stories produced by KQED Public Radio.
Networked Journalism is a national effort founded by J Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism that has helped established partnerships between online-only outlets and traditional news organizations like The Oregonian and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers. It is supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“We are enthusiastic about working with the Networked Journalism initiative.And we’re excited about this opportunity to work with local news groups and organizations across the Bay Area to present a more diverse, more in-depth news service for our respective online news readers and radio listeners,” remarked Jo Anne Wallace, Vice President and General Manager, KQED Public Radio.
As part of the project, staffers from Bay Area news organizations are also receiving training at KQED in radio production and exploring networking opportunities, as well as other possibilities for collaboration. KQED Community News Coordinator Molly Samuel emphasized that working with KQED has many benefits for local news outlets.
“We’re planning events and training so partners can meet each other and expand their skill sets. That will mean that our partners can do even more effective reporting in their communities, and be able to sustain themselves, despite a tough economy and limited resources,” Samuel said. “More and better journalism can only be a good thing, not just for KQED News listeners and readers, but for the Bay Area in general.”
Networked Journalism began in 2009 by working with 25 websites. It has since expanded to include partnerships with 65 websites nationally.
About KQED
KQED (kqed.org) has served Northern California for more than 50 years and is affiliated with NPR and PBS. KQED owns and operates public television stations KQED 9 (San Francisco/Bay Area), KQED Plus (San Jose/Bay Area), and KQET 25 (Watsonville/Monterey); KQED Public Radio (88.5FM San Francisco and 89.3FM Sacramento); the interactive platforms kqed.org and KQEDnews.org; and KQED Education. KQED Public Television, one of the nation's most-watched public television stations, is the producer of local and national series such as QUEST; Check, Please! Bay Area; This Week in Northern California; Truly CA; and Essential Pépin. KQED's digital television channels include 9HD, KQED Life, KQED World, KQED Kids, and KQED V-me, and are available 24/7 on Comcast. KQED Public Radio, home of Forum with Michael Krasny and The California Report, is one of the most-listened-to public radio stations in the nation with an award-winning news and public affairs program service delivering more than eighteen local newscasts daily. KQED Interactive provides KQED’s cross-platform news service, KQEDnews.org, as well as offers several popular local blogs, video and audio podcasts, and a live radio stream at kqed.org. KQED Education brings the impact of KQED to thousands of teachers, students, parents, and the general public through workshops, community screenings, and multimedia resources.
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Wed, 08/10/2011 - 09:04
CONTACT:
Michael Stoll, Executive Director
Lila LaHood, Director of Operations and Development
(415) 495-7377 — news [AT] sfpublicpress.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The San Francisco Public Press publishes its fall 2011 print edition — the fourth since launching last summer — on Wednesday, Aug. 10, with a special section on the prospect of better city budgeting, and engaging stories from 16 local public media and civic organizations.
The headliner for Issue 4 is a collaborative project with Shareable.net, a website focusing on the sharing movement, exploring how San Francisco’s perennial budget-cutting process might be improved. Reporters looked at the growing trend of “participatory budgeting,” the use of the Internet to promote transparency and the unfulfilled promise of government audits to identify and eliminate millions of dollars in waste.
The package also includes examples of how budget cuts almost derailed some vital city services, such as naturalization services for senior citizens, and how nonprofit organizations are forced to lobby politicians to “add back” funds after the budget passes.
The 16-page, two-section broadsheet newspaper will be available for sale for $1 at about 50 locations around the Bay Area. The print run is 8,000 copies. Parts of the budget package will be published online first on Shareable.net and later on SFpublicpress.org.
The latest edition of the Public Press also features in-depth policy-focused stories from partner organizations such as KQED’s “Forum” with Michael Krasny, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting, KALW News, the San Francisco Neighborhood Newspaper Association, California Northern Magazine and new partners such as the bilingual newspaper El Tecolote and the Public Policy Institute of California.
“The fall issue focuses on vital public policy choices facing the city of San Francisco in an unprecedented era of year-after-year budget cutting,” said Michael Stoll, the organization’s executive director. “It shows that small startup public media organizations can do important public-interest explanatory news reporting and fill in some of the gaps left by the ever-shrinking commercial press.”
The papers will arrive on Wednesday, August 10, at 6 a.m. and go on sale immediately at the Public Press office at 965 Mission Street, Suite 220, in San Francisco. Newspapers will be distributed to Bay Area retailers throughout the day. A regularly updated list of retailers carrying the paper can be found on the website: http://sfpublicpress.org/where-to-buy-the-newspaper. Also, check our Twitter (http://twitter.com/sfpublicpress) and Facebook (http://facebook.com/sfpublicpress) pages for live updates on where to get a copy.
LAUNCH PARTY: NOON ON SATURDAY, AUG. 13, CRISSY FIELD. The Public Press is sponsoring a “print launch picnic” on Saturday, Aug. 13, to celebrate Issue 4 and the more than 50 people who put it together. Drop by the East Beach picnic area at Crissy Field between noon and 3 p.m. for a family friendly afternoon of food, drinks and games. We’ll also be handing out free copies of the newspaper. Please remember to RSVPso that we bring enough food: http://sfpublicpress-picnic.eventbrite.com. Volunteers will be collecting donations — “sliding scale, pay as you wish” — at the picnic.
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The San Francisco Public Press is a local, nonprofit, noncommercial news organization covering local public-interest journalism — with a focus on economy, civics and streetscape — in the Bay Area. We aim to do for print and Web what public broadcasting does for television and radio. We produce news online daily and in a quarterly print newspaper.
Submitted by Michael Stoll on Sat, 06/25/2011 - 14:07
This week’s #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web journalists on Twitter, was on a topic that is significant to journalists and nonjournalists alike: the future of journalism jobs.
The chat was founded by Robert Hernandez, assistant professor of professional practice at the University of Southern California, Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism, and Kim Bui, social media and communication editor at KPCC 89.3-FM in Pasadena.
According to the organizers, the focus for this week’s conversation was inspired by a series of articles on the Bay Area media landscape that was published by the San Francisco Public Press this spring.
Some of the key questions discussed in this week’s #wjchat session are:
@wjchat Q1B What skill sets would you need to get hired in this new future? #wjchat
@wjchatQ5 Are core journalistic ethics changing in this new landscape? Should they? #wjchat
@wjchat Q7 Are failing news orgs worth saving? Is this evolution and natural selection at work?
We thank the organizers and participants of #wjchat for this discourse.
Discussions like this are crucial to the revitalization and reinvention of the news industry both locally and nationally. Some hold the view that journalism is facing dark times that can only be rectified by the bright glow of content-rich news websites on computer screens, smart phones and tablets. Some believe that dusting off and resuscitating rusted printing presses can be of immense value to the community, especially in eradicating the digital divide.
There is much debate and discussion within the journalism community about what is next, what to expect, and what paths to take in terms of finding jobs in the field, maintaining journalistic ethics in a rapidly mutating digital environment, and producing long-form and investigative features in newsrooms where journalism jobs are evaporating, among many other questions.
But undoubtedly, the future of journalism will touch all of us.
With this in mind, the voices of community members are just as important as the voices of journalists in building the news ecosystem of the coming years.
So to continue the conversation, we ask everyone:
How have the loss of journalism jobs in the Bay Area affected you? Are the issues that matter to you being covered by your local news organizations? What types of innovations have you seen or would like to see in the news industry?
We want to hear from you. Share your responses and questions by leaving comments here, on Twitter (@sfpublicpress) or on our Facebook page.
Articles will be distributed internationally and available to all of Reuters’ customers — news organizations that distribute in print, online and in broadcast media.
The network, a consortium of more than 50 nonprofit news organizations, many of them startups, was founded last year in an effort to share news stories and operational resources to increase the reach of the journalism the organizations produce. They include the Center for Public Integrity, California Watch, MinnPost and the St. Louis Beacon. Seven members are located in the Bay Area. They are SF Public Press, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting, Spot.Us, Newsdesk.org, New America Media, Oakland Local and the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism.
Of the members of the network, 30 are participating in the Reuters deal.
“Investigative reporting is at the forefront of our mission, and we’re excited to expand our reach and serve Reuters clients around the globe,” said Kevin Davis, chief executive officer of the Investigative News Network.
The Public Press already syndicates its stories to Yahoo! and the Bay Citizen, and is developing distribution relationships with other publishers.
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One reader wrote in response to a 
eb journalists on Twitter, was on a topic that is significant to journalists and nonjournalists alike: the future of journalism jobs.
The San Francisco Public Press will start 
