Essay

  1. January 25, 2012 06:00 AM

    When the 99% Had a Paper

    The brief, wondrous life of PM

    By Christopher B. Daly

    For months, the journalism world had been abuzz with the rumor that Ralph Ingersoll, the editorial genius behind Time, Fortune, and Life, was leaving Henry Luce to start his own publication. Supposedly, it was going to be a daily newspaper in New York City.

    Finally, on the morning of June 18, 1940, Ingersoll was poised...

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  2. December 6, 2011 06:00 AM

    A Mad Libs Keynote

    The future of journalism? Just fill in the blanks.

    By Justin Peters .

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  3. November 18, 2011 09:00 AM

    What Can I Build Today?

    Online startups can win the future by staying in the present

    By Michael Meyer

    There are hundreds of local and regional online news startups in America, but only about five that media observers discuss with any frequency. The names will be familiar: Voice of San Diego, The Texas Tribune, MinnPost, the Chicago News Cooperative, The Bay Citizen. All are well-funded, big-city nonprofits backed...

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  4. November 17, 2011 06:00 AM

    On Facebook and Freedom

    Why journalists should not surrender to the Walmarts of the web

    By Justin Peters

    In September of this year, the Internet briefly burbled with the news that Facebook, the market leader in workday-wastery, would soon debut several fundamental changes to its site. For some of the more excitable online pundits, this was akin to the discovery of a heretofore-unnoticed ocean, and as the date of the redesign drew closer, they devolved into hysterics....

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  5. November 16, 2011 06:00 AM

    Money Changes Everything

    Independent journalism can't lean on a few rich donors

    By Tom McGeveran

    In lower Manhattan as I write, thousands of protesters, recently joined by some unions, local New York politicians, and a few celebrities, are thronging Zuccotti Park. While their message is by design not a unified one, and specific demands of the sort one expects at a protest are evidently not forthcoming, there is a loose, common belief that explains...

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  6. November 14, 2011 06:00 AM

    What About Modesto?

    The digital-news parade threatens to pass some communities by

    By The Editors

    In Modesto, California, the need for news far exceeds the current supply. A city of 200,000 with one midsized newspaper, a large Hispanic population, 16 percent unemployment, and the second-highest rate of car theft in the nation, Modesto lies just ninety-two miles east of San Francisco. But the spirit of news experimentation that pervades the Bay Area...

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  7. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    Just Press On

    Templates for Anytown, USA

    By Michael Stoll

    Nic Roethlisberger and Dhyana Levey now live in the foggy Richmond District of San Francisco, flanked by the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate. The couple spent the mid-2000s in and around Modesto—Nic as a copy editor at The Modesto Bee and Dhyana as an environmental reporter for the Merced Sun-Star and the Sonora Union Democrat. In 2008 they...

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  8. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    Modesto, California

    By the numbers

    By The Editors Population
    201,165
    Eighteenth-largest city in California; 107th-largest city in the US, between Des Moines, Iowa, and Fayetteville, North Carolina

    Location


    Race and ethnicity
    65% white
    35.5% Hispanic
    6.7% Asian
    4.2% African American

    Median household income
    $47,983

    Major employers
    Stanislaus County, E&J Gallo Winder, Modesto City Schools, Foster Farms, Seneca Foods, Del Monte Foods

    Unemployment...

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  9. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    A Paperless Bee

    Making the future online

    By Rusty Coats

    In 1993, I was driving home to Modesto after covering a Bay Area conference on cryptography, having spent the past fourteen hours with hackers, phone phreaks, and other libertines who inhabited the pre-web text warren called the Internet. My head buzzed with encryption algorithms, social engineering schemes, and visions of an emerging digital frontier as I crested the Coastal Range.

    ...

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  10. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    Class Struggle

    Tech won't end the digital divide

    By Jen Schradie

    Like many American cities, Modesto has been decimated by local media layoffs and cutbacks in recent years. Journalists have more responsibilities than ever, and so they’ve come to rely on Twitter, Facebook, local blogs, and Google as vital parts of their news-gathering efforts. Before this digital shift, journalists too often under-reported, stereotyped, and misrepresented poor and working class Americans. Now,...

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  11. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    School’s Out

    A lost generation of journalists

    By Laura Paull

    A journalist walks across the Modesto Junior College campus in the mid-1990s and peeks in the newspaper office, where dedicated students ankle-deep in gluey paper strips are laying out eight broadsheet pages, scissors and pencils in hands. Though their backgrounds vary, they have each discovered in the task of producing a newspaper the purpose they need to keep coming...

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  12. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

    Plowing Ahead

    A farm newspaper's future

    By Kristin Platts

    Agriculture is and always has been the backbone of the California economy. Last year, Stanislaus County exported agriculture products to eighty-five countries and brought in a farm gate value of $2.6 billion. With so much of the state’s economy relying on Central Valley farmers, it’s a shame that many residents still do not grasp agriculture’s importance.

    The public disconnect from...

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  13. November 8, 2011 06:00 AM

    Confidence Game

    The limited vision of the news gurus

    By Dean Starkman

    “The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”—Clay Shirky

    “The whole notion of ‘long-form journalism’ is writer-centered, not...

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  14. June 2, 2011 10:10 AM

    Pay Up

    Sources have their agendas. Why can’t money be one?

    By John Cook

    Paying for information is, among American journalists, generally regarded as falling in the same moral category as paying for sex. True reporters get their information cleanly and by the sweat of their brow, not by waving around soiled Andrew Jacksons. As the New York Times’s ethics policy puts it, “We do not pay for interviews or unpublished documents: to...

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