User:Rosieroll/"The Bay Citizen"

The Bay Citizen is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, member-supported news organization covering San Francisco Bay Area civic and community news.

The Bay Citizen has joined a small but growing number of similar news organizations across the country dedicated to locally-focused public service journalism, including Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and MinnPost.

History
Over the past five years, the San Francisco Bay Area, mirroring national trends, has experienced a significant decline in professional newsroom staff and in original reporting of civic and cultural news. Concerned about the negative impact of this decline on the Bay Area community, local philanthropist Warren Hellman convened an advisory group that would eventually found The Bay Citizen (first known as the Bay Area News Project) in September of 2009.

Lisa Frazier, formerly the head of McKinsey & Company’s West Coast Media and Entertainment practice, was appointed President and CEO. Under Frazier's leadership, The Bay Citizen formed collaborations with leading journalism institutions including The New York Times and the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and recruited a newsroom headed by The Industry Standard veteran Jonathan Weber.

In addition to Weber, editorial staff includes Managing Editor for News Steve Fainaru, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist formerly with the Washington Post ; Jeanne Carstensen, formerly of Salon.com, and SFGate.com, and 11 full-time journalists. Weber claims he received over 500 resumes for the editorial positions.

On May 26, 2010, The Bay Citizen launched its online content on baycitizen.org. On June 4, 2010, The Bay Citizen’s newsroom began producing articles for the two-page Bay Area Report in The New York Times's print papers delivered to over 65,000 Bay Area New York Times subscribers on Fridays and Sundays. Over time, The Bay Citizen also plans to distribute news through podcasts, radio, and potentially television.

Content
The Bay Citizen's news coverage focuses on in-depth enterprise reporting along a half-dozen core "beats" including public policy, health and science, environment and land use, education, arts and culture, crime, and business.

The website is regularly updated with breaking news and commentary via its blogs, which include Pulse of The Bay, which provides a quick look at Bay Area news developments throughout the day; File Under Juvenile, a weekly column on the critically important but chronically troubled child protection system news; Citizen Blogs created by users and hosted on The Bay Citizen's Web site; regular staff blogs, and a recurring column by Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Weber.

The site launched with a feature story investigating the legacy of Proposition 13 in San Francisco's wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood. Other recent coverage has included the quasi-legal marijuana business, the June 2010 primary elections, and the migration of local sports stadiums to the South Bay.

In addition to original stories from its in-house newsroom, The Bay Citizen also partners with a wide variety of local independent publishers for community news. Partners include New America Media, Oakland Local, SF Public Press, Mission Loc@l, and others.

Board of Directors

 * Warren Hellman, Chairman of the Board and founder of Hellman & Friedman
 * Neil Henry, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
 * Jeffrey Ubben, Founder of ValueAct Capital and Chair of the Posse Foundation
 * Andrew Woeber, Partner/Managing Director at Greenhill & Co.
 * Susan Hirsch, President of Hirsch & Associates, LLC
 * Lisa Frazier, President and CEO of The Bay Citizen

Funding
The Bay Citizen launched on May 26, 2010 with $9 million in funding from foundations, philanthropists, corporations, and individuals. Major funders include The Hellman Family Foundation, Jeff and Laurie Ubben, the Fisher family, Diane B. Wilsey (Dede Wilsey), the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Arthur Rock, The San Francisco Foundation, and Lynn Feintech and Anthony Bernhardt. The Bay Citizen also raised $75,000 from 830 individual founding members.