On February 8, the College Preparatory School Parents' Association will host a LiveTalk panel featuring four extraordinary guests at the heart of the rebirth of local news.
To save your seats, please register now. Doors open at 6:30 pm for light refreshments and mingling, panel begins at 7:00 pm.
Tickets:
Free: Current College Prep Students, Faculty, and Staff
$15: College Prep Parents, Alumni Parents, and Alumni
$25: Non-College Prep Community Members
Local news is the lifeblood of democracy, but that blood is running dry. Between 2005 and the end of 2024, the U.S. will have lost a third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its journalists. Of the great newspapers that once ringed the San Francisco Bay – the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, and San Jose Mercury News, along with the Contra Costa Times, Marin Independent Journal, and Vallejo Times-Herald – only the Chronicle survives as a full-scale newspaper. The rest are owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which has bought hundreds of American newspapers, slashed their staffs and is now squeezing the last bits of revenue out of them.
Yet a new generation of news sources is rising fast – news sites funded by national, community, and family philanthropies, which in 2023 committed more than $500 million to support local news. California is teeming with nonprofit news sites, including local news sites like Berkeleyside, statewide policy sites like CalMatters, and national issues sites like KFF Health News, along with sites like El Tímpano serving communities historically ignored by the media.
Is nonprofit news sustainable? Can the model serve the full civic information needs of citizens, both in the Bay Area and in regions with little local wealth and sparse populations? Can these sites deliver local and regional news in a way that is relevant to the TikTok generation? Or are we heading into a near future where only well-funded special-interest groups like property developers and public employees’ unions are informed and engaged enough to influence local decision making?
Our panelists include:
Martin G. Reynolds is co-executive director of the
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, former editor-in-chief of the Oakland Tribune, and former director of Reveal Investigative Fellowships at The Center for Investigative Reporting. He conducts Fault Lines diversity training programs for media companies and colleges and universities, and is co-founder of Oakland Voices, a community storytelling project that trains residents to serve as community correspondents. He began his reporting career in Oakland covering economic development, crime and general assignment. Martin views journalism as a public trust and is concerned about journalistic redlining happening in certain communities due to industry turmoil, mergers and acquisitions.
Katherine Ann Rowlands, publisher of Bay City News, founder of
LocalNewsMatters.org, president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition and co-founder of Women Do News. Bay City News, where she began her career as an intern and which she bought in 2018, has expanded to cover news in 12 counties 24/7, supplying trustworthy, original journalism for media ranging from TV and radio to legacy newspapers to start-up digital outlets. Its nonprofit affiliate LocalNewsMatters.org has trained more than 40 paid interns and published thousands of stories about arts and culture, equity, demographics, the environment and civic life that would otherwise not be told, and partnered with other nonprofits to bolster the information communities need to strengthen democracy.
Madeleine Bair founded and leads the civic media organization
El Tímpano to reach Bay Area residents who have never had robust access to local news—the region’s Latino and Mayan immigrants, many of them day laborers, house cleaners, caretakers, and fast food workers, living in one of the world’s costliest regions. El Timpano’s unique model of public service journalism delivers news by text message on issues relevant to its audiences, including combating anti-vax disinformation, addressing rumors of ICE raids and reporting on illegal housing evictions. On December 18, the MacArthur Foundation named El Tímpano one of the first recipients of $48 million in grants to fund nonprofit local news, as part of the new Press Forward initiative. Support from nearly two dozen foundations has enabled El Tímpano to grow from a single-person start-up into an established organization with a full-time staff of 12. The organization has also built a revenue stream from public agencies and nonprofit service providers who work through El Timpano to communicate with hard-to-reach audiences.
Geoffrey King is founder and executive editor of the two-person nonprofit news outlet
Open Vallejo, president and CEO of the Informed California Foundation and a First Amendment litigator. Geoff’s reporting on Vallejo’s extraordinarily high rate of civilian shootings by police revealed the “Badge of Honor” ritual, in which Vallejo police officers would bend in a corner of their star-shaped badges for each citizen they killed. In 2019, Open Vallejo reported, nearly 40 percent of Vallejo’s police officers had been in at least one shooting, and more than a third of those had participated in two or more.
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