To open my talk to Junior State high school students, I asked how many read newspapers. I expected few hands would be raised in the well-filled Los Angeles Times community room. Wrong. Well over a dozen--maybe more--signaled they read those old-fashioned print communications.

Having spent much of my life writing for papers, I was pleased. It was a change from he negative answer I often get when speaking to journalism and communications classes at USC.

Junior State of America is an organization of students interested in public affairs. They were spending a few days in Los Angeles, taking a look at the uplifting and the seamy side of politics and government in the big city. I was a member at San Leandro High School, when the organization was called Junior Statesmen.

On Monday, I talked briefly about my career, steering clear of the journalistic war stories I know bore young people. I told them how I transitioned from the Times after I retired to three web sites, LA Observed, Truthdig and the Jewish Journal, which has a print edition along with an excellent Internet presence. I talked about writing for the Internet. I discussed the necessity of making posts hot and interesting to attract readers, or as they are known today, clicks. I told them about pressure to be fast—and first.

A couple of the students wondered whether that was sensationalizing the news, slanting it or just getting it downright wrong in the rush to get more clicks than the competition or come up with something that will go viral, racing through the web. They worried whether the people were getting the straight news.

These are important questions. A few floors upstairs, in the Times newsroom, editors and reporters discuss them every day. They’re under pressure to produce stories of viral quality for the web site, and bosses check to see which reporters and editors reach the highest viral scores.

I was pleased that my Junior State audience saw the danger of it, as do many of the journalists who play that risky game. Actually, I played the game years ago when I was with the Associated Press, determined to be first and best so my story would be used by the newspapers we served instead of a story by a rival wire service.

I was also glad the event was at the Times. I always run into friends there. This time it was Bettina Boxall, the Pulitzer Prize winning environmental reporter and Rich Connell, the city county bureau chief, a job I once held.

I left holding my gift from Junior State, a mug with a slogan that’s good advice for journalists and politicians, whether they are veterans or high school students starting out. It reminds them of those they serve: “Be The People.”

The journalists have weighed in on Mayor Eric Garcetti’s first year in office, cautiously and safely concluding his record had been acceptable but wishing it could have been better. The mayor showed no such ambivalence. “As we think about the future, let's take a moment to celebrate, not just our world champion Los Angeles Kings, but so much more,” he said in an e-mail addressed to me and, I assume, thousands of others.

But thanks to Garcetti, we can do without the journalists’ spin. Nor do we need his somewhat self-serving assessment.

The latest version of the mayoral web site, DataLA, greatly improved from its shaky first edition, is beginning to provide even modestly computer-savvy Angelenos enough information to come to their own conclusions about the mayor and the rest of city government. Combine that with Controller Ron Galperin’s web site, Control Panel, which provides city salaries and other expenditures. With these online tools, muckrakers, activists, policy wonks, academics and others are on their way to being as well informed as journalists, lobbyists, City Hall aides and other local government insiders.

I went to a section called “Back To Basics: Performance Metrics”, since the mayor has been bragging about his back to basics approach. Windows, or tiles, lead you to various city functions. To try it out, I hit building permits and came upon a map of every building permit in the city. That’s useful information for neighborhood councils, homeowner associations and snoops.

I settled on a major controversy—jobs. Is Los Angeles a job killer, as opponents of business taxes and a minimum wage claim? And is it a city divided between the influential rich and the many poor? Too often these questions are handled in the news media by quoting so-called experts on either side and on the campaign trail with either diatribes or vague speeches.

DataLA gives two measurements. The state puts Los Angeles unemployment at 8.4 percent and the UCLA Anderson forecast says it is 8.2 percent. That’s sharply down from last July when it was 14.5 percent, according to the state and 13.8 percent by Anderson’s estimates. But state unemployment has dropped to 7.6 percent. So, to some extent, L.A. is a job killer. In the future, the debate can be conducted with hard numbers. These were always available to determined searchers but now they are easily accessible.

So are figures on poverty. Another tile leads you to the fact that 62 percent of Angelenos spend 30 percent of their gross income on rent. That means their pay is small and their rent too high. It’s much worse than San Jose (54 percent) and San Francisco (45 percent). In fact, 33 percent of Los Angeles residents spend more than half of their monthly income on rent.

The site still needs work. I find the maps a bit hard to navigate, and I would like them to be clearer. But the site also provides tools for computer smart people to refine the data, to sort it by several categories. This is tremendous for activists and dissenters who want to fight city hall but are usually brushed off by officials who claim to have all the information. Political campaigners, usually out spent and out maneuvered, will be able to blast their foes with facts on social media, web sites and e-mails.

Mayor Garcetti deserves credit for setting up and improving the site, giving Los Angeles a better way to judge his first year.