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California Watch has been one of the most successful nonprofit journalism startups in the country, landing one big story after another since 2009 and winning top awards — all with a strong California focus and identity. But for reasons its overseers explain in blog posts this morning, the California Watch identity is being dropped and the operation rebranded under the name of its founding parent, the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley. The reporting focus will become less about California, and less about news that isn't directly tied to the team's investigative reports. The Bay Citizen, the formerly independent local news startup in the Bay Area that became part of CIR last year, will also go away. Robert J. Rosenthal, who was the head of the Center for Investigative Reporting before CW started up, takes the first crack at explaining what's up.
You can expect the same unique, in-depth reporting but without the confusion of three names.
Since CIR founded California Watch in 2009 and merged with The Bay Citizen in 2012, we have been doing a lot under three brands – reporting, managing websites, partnering with top media organizations across the country, holding public events and engaging with you online.Initially, the different brands separated our national and international, California and local San Francisco Bay Area reporting. Over the past year, we have found that more of our stories transcend geography. Our CIR, California Watch and Bay Citizen reporting has changed laws, saved lives, brought attention to critical problems that affect all of us and won prestigious journalism awards.
We know that as long as we are telling the right stories – the stories that no one else is covering, the stories that reveal deeply hidden information, the stories that actually make a difference in people’s lives – it doesn’t matter if they are about San Francisco or Sacramento or Washington, D.C. And if we apply a creative approach to finding and telling those stories – through animation, interactive data apps, video, radio, text, social media and reports in multiple languages – they will serve and engage you, our audience, no matter who and where you are.
There also are purely practical reasons for consolidating under one name – namely, saving staff time and money. We spend countless hours managing three websites and 12 social media accounts and publishing our stories with different branding depending on the partner outlet. As a nonprofit organization, resource allocation matters.
There's also a blog post from Mark Katches, the editorial director at California Watch since the beginning.
One website. One brand. One newsroom. We are now The Center for Investigative Reporting – and only The Center for Investigative Reporting. Although it was tough to cut loose our local and statewide brand names, our commitment to public service journalism remains as strong as ever. And our growth continues.So how will these branding changes affect our story selection and the scope of our reporting?
First and foremost, we have rededicated ourselves to high-impact investigative reporting – stories that matter. We’ve largely stopped covering routine stories and breaking news, which got in the way of this core mission. Last year, we generated about 1,000 stories. By choice, we expect to produce about 200 stories this year. But the stories we go after will be the ones we think can make a difference.
We also are closely examining the scope of our stories.
Last year, about 95 percent of the stories generated out of this newsroom were either focused on the Bay Area or the state of California. That left a small fraction of our work focused on national or international issues or produced in a way that would appeal to an audience outside California’s borders.
We began 2013 with a new approach – to strike more of a balance among local, statewide and national/international storytelling. We think this balance is important to help CIR reach bigger and more targeted audiences while also building a stronger brand around investigative journalism.
We are working toward a healthier blend – in the ballpark of one-third local, one-third regional/statewide, and one-third national or international.
There are now 45 journalists employed by what will become the Center for Investigative Reporting on May 29. "We are the only investigative organization in the country capable of producing in-house work for TV, radio, print and the Web," says Katches. I suspect they will be formidable on the national stage, but the diluted California focus will be missed here. California Watch never had the impact in Southern California that it might: the editors and most of the reporters are in Berkeley and they just never got past defining "California" as mostly the greater Bay Area and Sacramento, instead of where most Californians live. But who else had 45 investigative journalists looking at California? Nobody. California Watch was a Pulitzer finalist this year for its investigation of state homes.
Random thought: is the name California Watch now available? Seems like a great, catchy brand name for the Internet era.
Another lens for this is that it's a new lesson in the difficulty of building a strong financial or readership base for a publication that tries to appeal to all of the many nations of California. There are regional outlets, and speciality magazines like Sunset and California Lawyer, but I can't think offhand of any publisher or website that has succeeded in stitching the state together.
