When Jonathan Webertook the job of editor-in-chief of the Bay Area News Project a few weeks ago, 200 resumes lay waiting for him. I'm sure that some of the more than one hundred job-starved journalists crammed into the "meet Jonathan Weber" event held Wednesday night at the World Affairs Council had resumes on that pile -- I know mine's there -- and there was more naked desperation in that room than at a match.com gathering.
Weber's only getting around to answering his applicants now, sifting through them to find 15 hires, half of whom will be reporting for the news org. Those 7.5 people will be a mix of junior and senior reporters, covering enterprise, big stories, daily news, traditional civic beats, cops and courts, environment and healthcare.
He admits it's impossible to truly cover all those beats with such a small staff and that some reporters will have to wear multiple hats, but that he hopes to triple their numbers over the next four years.
Other staff will be editors who are "outwardly focused," coordinating paid contributors, bloggers, and citizen journalists, while editing 40-50 stories per week. A third group will focus on delivery, "productizing" the news through Web and mobile. Weber is also setting aside a "significant budget" for freelancers. And he'll hire some paid interns.
Management-wise, they've just hired Brian Kelley as the chief technology officer (and announced it via twitter, how 3.0).
During Q & A, older journalists' questions showed anxiety that they wouldn't be hired because they were too old and not tech-savvy enough. Many younger reporters' remarks seemed designed to demonstrate that they're Very Serious About Journalism, betraying a lack of experience.
As for partnerships, you already know that the New York Times is in -- starting in June, BANP will produce two of pages twice/week for the Bay Area edition. And KQED is out, after "discussions (that) did not result in an agreement." AWKward.
While temporarily housed in space provided by a law firm at 555 Mission, BANP is looking for permanent digs somewhere downtown. The $5 million initiative, now under his direction (and allegedly no longer that of its principal funder, Warren Hellman), is slated to launch in late spring of this year. It's also hoping to lock down a permanent name that doesn't ruffle the feathers of the 200 locally-based news organizations with San Francisco in their name.
Jiu-jitsu has become a way of life for dozens of residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, thanks to a new dojo opened in 2009 by Jiu-Jitsu master and living legend Carlos Sapao Ban.
Here, students learn to defend themselves, lead a healthy life, build strength and gain confidence.
With his life spent under the tutelage of the Gracie family and after winning multiple world titles, Ban has joined the San Francisco community, where he has begun sharing his brand of Jiu-Jitsu with an eager crowd.
His beach-side dojo, located at 710 La Playa Street in San Francisco's Outter Richmond District, has quickly blossomed into a community institution since it opened in late 2009.
Here, everyone is welcome and the first class is always free.
New America Media, News feature/, Cassidy Friedman, Posted: Jan 01, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO – California is counting on its nonprofits for outreach in the 2010 Census. But a widespread shortage of community-based organizations in the state’s poorest communities, which have historically been toughest to count, could spark undercounts even in cities that appear best equipped to tackle census outreach, organizers say.
“This is a big, big challenge,” said Ted Wang, a census consultant with Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, which is coordinating private sector funding for outreach in California. “Neighborhoods that have the least amount of infrastructure often are the ones that are the most difficult to count.”
San Francisco is a case in point. No county in California has spent anywhere near the city’s $570,000 investment on outreach, according to city officials. San Francisco is also home to 2,879 public charity nonprofits – more per capita than any other county in the state, public records show. But an investigation by New America Media found that despite these achievements, in Bay View-Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley, neighborhoods where the response rates to the 2000 Census were lowest and the need for outreach in 2010 is arguably greatest, there are disproportionately few nonprofits and very little capacity to do outreach.
The city’s solution – to fund outside nonprofits that serve a wider area to go door-to-door in the two neighborhoods – won’t achieve the same results as using native nonprofits, said Sharen Hewitt, executive director of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response Project (C.L.A.E.R.), based in Visitacion Valley. Hewitt believes such organizations may “fall short on making people feel comfortable opening their doors.”
If so, this “funding gap” may contribute to a repeat of the 2000 census, when the city was undercounted by 100,000, resulting in a loss of more than $300 million in federal funding, according to a 2007 study.
If the same pattern repeats across the state, California residents could lose billions of federal dollars for vital services over the next decade.
IMPACTS ON THE CENSUS
When San Francisco announced earlier this year that it had $300,000 to fund a nonprofit census-outreach collaborative, the city encouraged organizations in Bay View and Visitacion Valley to apply.
“We were looking for people that knew the population and the population trusted,” said Adrienne Pon, executive director of the city’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs.
City officials hoped to fund a team of nonprofits that were already regularly engaged with the same hard-to-count residents they would be targeting for the census.
In 2000, those demographics included the many public housing residents who complained they never received a census questionnaire or whose addresses were missing from the US Census Bureau master list. Homeless people, non-English speakers, undocumented immigrants and young adults also ranked high on the list.
But those demographics are changing in subtle ways that only a native nonprofit can detect, Hewitt said.
After a competitive process, a selection committee composed of grant makers and foundation representatives hired a collaborative of 13 nonprofits, including New America Media, to conduct census outreach.
None of the 13 nonprofits are headquartered in Bay View-Hunters Point or Visitacion Valley. The organizations do, however, clearly meet other funding criteria, and four of the organizations serve large swaths of the city, which include the southeastern neighborhoods.
The few “obvious good matches” in both Bay View and Visitacion Valley were stretched to capacity and declined to apply, said Pon.
Hewitt argues outreach was inadequate, despite what city officials call a “rigorous” outreach campaign, which included a well-attended workshop and public notices. Although CLAER met the eligibility criteria, the nonprofit was never consulted about the existence of funding, she said.
N’Tanya Lee, director of Coleman Advocates – one of the census grant recipients - admits being based outside the neighborhoods puts the collaborative at a disadvantage.
“Many community members … don’t trust the services (and) because they’re not indigenous community institutions they’re often not culturally relevant,” Lee said.
Statewide Trend
The lack of nonprofits in San Francisco’s southeast corner reflects a statewide trend of nonprofits falling outside highest need areas, according Dr. Carol J. Silverman, a researcher at UC Berkeley and author of a recent study of San Francisco’s nonprofit sector.
Nonprofits tend to clamor around hubs for civic institutions, for example, San Francisco’s downtown, said Silverman.
But Bay View Hunters Point faces its own challenges, Lee said.
Census outreach did not draw “the same kind of zeal or participation at any level” from Bay View’s predominantly African American population as it did from nonprofits based elsewhere in the city, according to Angelo King, chairman of the Bay View-Hunters Point Project Area Committee.
Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, once the area’s principal employer, lured tens of thousands of African Americans to San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the shipyard shuttered in the 1970s, San Francisco has experienced “a more significant decline in the African American population than anywhere in the country,” Lee said.
“And with that decline has come a decline in the strength of our community institutions, our political institutions, our agencies, the leadership in the community – so many people have left to the East Bay and other parts of the country that there just isn’t the same capacity in the community to serve its own interests and to serve its own needs,” Lee said.
Million of Dollars are at Stake
California cut nearly all outreach funding for Census 2010 after shelling out nearly $25 million for the 2000 census, although the philanthropic sector responded by filling in some of the gaps in public funding, contributing almost $8 million in California, including more than $700,000 to the Bay Area, Wang estimated. Meanwhile, the US Census Bureau does not compensate nonprofits doing outreach. The decline in outreach resources since the 2000 census means the success of San Francisco’s nonprofit collaborative will be crucial to the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Said Lee, “Millions of dollars are at stake that could be coming to these communities that they’re not accessing now because of this historic undercount.”
Michelle Yeung, a community advocate for the lead agency in the collaborative, Chinese for Affirmative Action, said the group is creating a plan to compensate for a lack of nonprofits based in the southeast. That strategy entails networking with their members, local service providers, and asking other familiar faces in the communities to assist them in going door to door.
Year after year after year, I've watched as people replace the three magic words with various saccharine substitutes: "Support the troops. Bring them home", "dissent is patriotic," - none of it feels like real affection to most of the roughly 50,000 who served and now live in San Francisco.
At Sunday's San Francisco Veterans Day Parade, just a few hundred casual onlookers showed up. That much is typical, has been ever since the Vietnam War. But what chilled me in reading SF Chronicle reporter Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera's event coverage was how only a 23-year-old ROTC volunteer Martinez interviewed expressed any regret at the low turnout.
According to parade chairman and Veterans Affairs Commission president Wallace Levin, one of the reasons behind the crowd-free parade is this city's cynicism about the military.
A decade ago, he says he hoped to confront a lack of "patriotism" in the city, maybe change some minds. But by coaching himself to see the bigger picture - that America is great because of dissenting cities like San Francisco - he's come to terms with the lack of affection in this city.
While shooting this video, however, I discovered that factors besides our "cynicism" might have been responsible for the low turnout, much of it related to the advance publicity of the event.
The Chronicle, in its advance brief on the event, reported the wrong time for the parade, which resulted in droves of people showing up at 1 p.m. for an 11 a.m. march, parade director Renie Champagne said.
Add to that that broadcast publicity was sparser this year, as at least one radio station dropped its sponsorship due to a lack of funding.
But the greatest publicity failure was online. Beyond a blog or two, there wasn't anything, presumably because Champagne was accustomed to mailing out press releases to the traditional media. "That's all that the public gets," he said.
The veterans sourced in the Chronicle's coverage of the parade, many of them older, either seemed wistfully trapped in the past - recalling vivid memories of triumph after WWII - or discounted the 2009 public's lack of appreciation. The parade marshal was even quoted as saying this year's parade was the best he could remember. Maybe he even meant it.
But beneath the code of silence, most vets in this city are secretly grieving over this. Purple Heart Navy legend Renie Champagne is one of them. He's directed the city's parade 59 years. After choosing his words carefully during an hour-long interview in his living room, the floodgates opened when we broached the concept of defending freedom. His eyes welled up. He went quiet. He looked me in the eyes, as if pleading, for the first time in the interview.
Feeling conservatives had "usurped" the limelight in the debate over healthcare reform through a series of high profile stunts and remarks, advocates of reform staged a goofy counter-attack, forming a flash mob Sept. 26 in an Oakland Whole Foods in response to the CEO's recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he argued healthcare is not an intrinsic right.
At 6:11 p.m., 35 protesters, who had been fake-shopping the aisles of the green foods giant, convened at the middle of the store, and launched into singing "Hey Mackey, you're a swine," some shouting it into a megaphone and others dancing a choreographed jig as a live orchestra blared from all directions.
One of the market's security guards, visibly overwhelmed, questioned the group and eventually police were called, but no complaints have been filed. Seeing the store had no plans to interfere, the performers completed two renditions, then leisurely filed out through an entrance to stage a continued demonstration on the sidewalk.
The market's manager declined comment. An employee at the customer service desk griped that the group was likely ill-informed about CEO John Mackey's stance on healthcare. He suggested the large turnout had more to do with the ease of arranging protests through social networking Web sites than anything pithy.
The presumably liberal audience was otherwise receptive. One or two shoppers joined the action. Even employees struggled to hide their amusement by the outburst.
There were some extreme reactions.
One patron who was shocked to discover Mackey's stance on healthcare reform left the store vowing to join the nationwide boycott of Whole Foods. Another shopper argued that despite his stance on healthcare reform, the Whole Foods founder should be commended for helping improve the country's diet by offering a health foods alternative that has contributed to keeping Americans out of the hospital.
Organizers dubbed the event a wild success, but admitted the true test -- whether wind of the event travels beyond the liberal Bay Area -- had yet to come.
Cameras: Matt Dibble, Regan Brashear, Adelaide Chen, Cassidy Friedman, Jamie Lejeune Editors: Cassidy Friedman, Jamie Lejeune (Media organizations wishing to obtain a clip of this video, contact video journalist Cassidy Friedman at cassidyfriedman@gmail.com or 415.717.1485)
Booing and hissing between spastic applause like children at a carnival, the Castro Theatre turned into a peanut gallery. The festival's executive director Peter Stein more than once asked the audience to listen to one another respectfully, to which the overwhelming majority of attendees hurled back a deafening bedlam of approval, drowning out the director's voice.
As Rachel's mother, Cindy Corrie, put it during the Q & A, the battle raging in the theater had less to do with herself, her daughter or the film than with pre-existing differences of opinion within the Jewish community. Forget whether the film was any good. This audience had already made up its mind some time between 1948 and when the curtains opened.
The final spot on the 2009 All-Star National team was a no-go for Giants third baseman Pablo Sandoval.
But in the final stages of the vote, more fans went on the internet to have their say than ever before. The San Francisco baseball team's fans surprised even themselves when some voted hundreds of times (there was no limit), and others caste thousands of votes.
The lead switched hands between Shane Victorino and Sandoval a half-dozen times during the course of this week's vote, driving some fans to drink, one to vote so much his wife threw a shoe at him, and still others to harass their friends to caste more votes. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom plugged for Sandoval.
Seventeen Chinese American families who won a pitched battle in June with their landlord, San Francisco City College, to remain in their apartment building was one of the greatest tenant success stories in San Francisco history - a no-bullshit instance where David beats Goliath. And yet all the tenants had to say about their triumph was (translated from Cantonese) "this is really convenient."
After shooting a couple hours of video footage at the grand opening at Columbus Street Cooperative, I figured I had a disaster on my hands. I'd captured a zillion soundbytes from the city's top hand shakers, who had turned out in droves to effuse about the historical moment, condemning SFCC with clenched fists in the air and applauding the tenants for bucking the system that wanted them out of the city - with a helping hand from the San Francisco Community Land Trust, which bought the building and reshaped it into a permanently-affordable resident-owned cooperative.
But when the tenants spoke, any emotion they harbored seemed to get lost in translation. I shared a somber moment with my co-shooter, Jamie Lejeune: "The only good stuff I'm getting is coming from the mouth of politicians. Arghh!," I said.
"Same here," he said.
I probed the building up several flights of stairs and entered the apartment of a disabled elderly woman sagging in her wheelchair, able to watch the ceremony only by peering down through her dining room window. Using the building manager as an interpreter, I asked questions to elicit a gut reaction.
"You speak only Chinese. From the sounds of it, you rarely travel outside Chinatown - where all your family and friends live. You can't afford another place in the city," I said. "What would relocating to somewhere else mean for you?"
She mumbled a few words - maybe only half of a really long word -- which the translator turned into an epic: against all odds, I get to hold onto my living situation. The outside world freaks me out. We fought long and hard for this. And we won.
Yeah right. If I had been interviewing the twinkly-eyed interpreter I would have had a banging story.
Ultimately, I did record some color: "We were scared," Mrs. Ru M. Peng, who with her husband and children faced eviction after occupying the same building for 18 years.
LeJeune, himself a member of the cooperative who had lived several years in east Asia, broke it down for me after the shoot, explaining the San Francisco touch-feelyness I've grown accustomed to here doesn't resonate in Chinese culture.
Short of the building burning down halfway through the ceremony, I would never unearth the hidden emotions I knew lay just beneath the surface.
Maybe I'm editorializing a tad here, but I'll argue to the grave I'm not, when I say: Take all this to mean when Mrs. Peng says she's scared, the matron really means she's never been more terrified in her life.
San Francisco's aging bison herd is threatened with extinction. Only five remain after one of the pack was euthanized in April due to disease and old age.
The bison recently returned to a new, $1.2 million dollar improved paddock in Golden Gate Park, but with a shortfall in the city budget that could mean cuts for public safety or programs that serve the poor, the money it would take to repopulate the shrinking herd is more than a little daunting.
Appeal videographer Cassidy Friedman went out to talk to those closest to the historic herd, got a look at the old ladies themselves, but ended up with more questions than answers. Maybe we shouldn't be asking "will they survive the recession?" but "should they?" -- Eve Batey(SF Appeal)
In some counties, citizens who can't pay off the debts they owe their city end up in county jail. San Francisco's Superior Court, however, has one of the country's most compassionate payment plan programs for debtors who can't immediately pay off their debts to the city. So there's a lot to be proud of.
But while the collections staff will work with you to form a payment plan, there's one form of payment that's come under some fire: the city's community service programs.
Impractically priced, with attached fees and pay rates of $6/hr, these city-funded programs that are supposed to enable the poorest among us to work off their debt by doing community service are doing little good for the people who really need them. In these hard economic times, the poor cannot afford to work double time for half the pay.
And few of the financially hardship-afflicted sign up, according to an administrator at San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which gets free labor through the city-funded (though how much it costs is unclear: Project 20, which runs work programs for the city, did not respond to this correspondent's phone call) work program.
The work programs may, however, owe their continued existence to a different group of people, ticketed drivers and fined defendants who merely wish to give something back to the city.
I recently asked to meet a Project 20 volunteer and was introduced to Kevin Drew, who sounded ecstatic about the program. Drew, who lives in Marin County, says he can afford to pay off his parking tickets but prefers to spend his weekends making the city a better place to live. It doesn't bother him that he's getting paid $6/hr because he's too wrapped up in the good services he's providing with the good folks at the Bicycle Coalition.
"It's also good for folks who get too many tickets who don't have the money to give a little bit to the general kind of social well being of the city," Drew said. "I got a job. I could really afford it. I just choose not to."
, Cassidy Friedman, Posted: Jan 01, 2010
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