Journalism and politics are sort of aspects of the same thing. Neither is too far from money. People should understand Bay Citizen in that mode of thinking.
[aside: I have a really clever start-up idea for a journalistic venture in Berkeley, CA and would like to find some partners. (lord -at- emf.net) Here's some back story to the linked story, though.]
In the Bay Area, the journalism industry has crashed pretty hard. Papers have failed, others shrunk considerably. A lot of government operates under far less scrutiny than T any time in living memory.
Historically, news moguls have had enormous political power. The movie Citizen Kane gives a cartoonish sense of the Hearst news / political machine. (The S.F. Chronicle is currently a Hearst paper. The real world Hearst castle that corresponds to the one in the movie is in these parts. Etc.)
The Hellman's (Bay Citizen's main benefactors and instigators) qualify, in this region, as "old money". The first Hellman to rise prominence here was a major player. If you read the society pages (what's left of them) you'll sometimes see the Hellman's and branches of that family like the Dinkelspiel's come up. They are Big Shots in these parts.
Thus, Bay Citizen could be characterized as "old money" swooping into to fill a journalistic void, in part motivated by a recognition of the political power represented in that void. I want to be clear that I'm absolutely not saying that Hellman is an egotistical power-grabbing Kane type or anything so cartoonish or anything so ethically simple minded. I'm just saying that it's not so surprising that when the regional journalism industry collapsed... one of our prominent and well established families would step up and try to get something going in that area. If it wasn't Hellman money, why, then, there's a short list of other family names that would have been next in line.
I won't comment on the editorial politics of Bay Citizen or some of their partner sites because I'll both get myself in trouble and bore most HN readers with too much insider Bay Area politics but I will skip to a prediction:
Bay Citizen isn't about to go under. The highly paid execs, I bet, mostly won't be tossed (if any will at all). Or if it gets rebooted and lots of people tossed ... it'll still be booted up and resume. Some funding will be renewed and the experiment will continue a few more years. The political power stakes are too high to just walk away. The money amounts are very low relative to those stakes. The tentative successes of Bay Citizen (e.g., a modest amount of syndication, etc.) look promising on paper. Nobody seriously expected a self-sustaining operation at the end of one year (especially given the peanuts they said they pay stringers).
Right now, Bay Citizen --- journalistically disappointing as it has been, in some of our views --- is nevertheless one of the loudest journalistic voices in a news-starved region. $5M was a bargain, so far. The project is an easy to make fun of tentative success, as far as I can tell, in the eyes of its main sponsors.
[aside: I have a really clever start-up idea for a journalistic venture in Berkeley, CA and would like to find some partners. (lord -at- emf.net) Here's some back story to the linked story, though.]
In the Bay Area, the journalism industry has crashed pretty hard. Papers have failed, others shrunk considerably. A lot of government operates under far less scrutiny than T any time in living memory.
Historically, news moguls have had enormous political power. The movie Citizen Kane gives a cartoonish sense of the Hearst news / political machine. (The S.F. Chronicle is currently a Hearst paper. The real world Hearst castle that corresponds to the one in the movie is in these parts. Etc.)
The Hellman's (Bay Citizen's main benefactors and instigators) qualify, in this region, as "old money". The first Hellman to rise prominence here was a major player. If you read the society pages (what's left of them) you'll sometimes see the Hellman's and branches of that family like the Dinkelspiel's come up. They are Big Shots in these parts.
Thus, Bay Citizen could be characterized as "old money" swooping into to fill a journalistic void, in part motivated by a recognition of the political power represented in that void. I want to be clear that I'm absolutely not saying that Hellman is an egotistical power-grabbing Kane type or anything so cartoonish or anything so ethically simple minded. I'm just saying that it's not so surprising that when the regional journalism industry collapsed... one of our prominent and well established families would step up and try to get something going in that area. If it wasn't Hellman money, why, then, there's a short list of other family names that would have been next in line.
I won't comment on the editorial politics of Bay Citizen or some of their partner sites because I'll both get myself in trouble and bore most HN readers with too much insider Bay Area politics but I will skip to a prediction:
Bay Citizen isn't about to go under. The highly paid execs, I bet, mostly won't be tossed (if any will at all). Or if it gets rebooted and lots of people tossed ... it'll still be booted up and resume. Some funding will be renewed and the experiment will continue a few more years. The political power stakes are too high to just walk away. The money amounts are very low relative to those stakes. The tentative successes of Bay Citizen (e.g., a modest amount of syndication, etc.) look promising on paper. Nobody seriously expected a self-sustaining operation at the end of one year (especially given the peanuts they said they pay stringers).
Right now, Bay Citizen --- journalistically disappointing as it has been, in some of our views --- is nevertheless one of the loudest journalistic voices in a news-starved region. $5M was a bargain, so far. The project is an easy to make fun of tentative success, as far as I can tell, in the eyes of its main sponsors.