It’s intern season at California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ve been fortunate to have interns year-round. But summer is a special time. New intern blood transfuses our newsroom. Exuberant, wide-eyed youngsters strive to make their mark during short stints as reporters, web producers and copy editors.

Ah, the internship.

My first came 26 years ago at the now-defunct Peninsula Times Tribune, a small, local paper in downtown Palo Alto. I can’t even begin to measure what I learned in those three months.

One of my biggest early influences in the Palo Alto newsroom was Judy Miller, then the young city editor of the Times Tribune. She soon left for the San Francisco Chronicle. Later, she directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at the Miami Herald where she eventually rose to managing editor.

Judy earned the nickname “Bulldog.” And it fit. I’ve never met anyone as tenacious and as relentless. I ran into her at the recent gathering of Investigative Reporters and Editors in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. We reminisced about the old days, and what she meant to my career. She inspired reporters to dig deep and to stop only when you reached the bottom.

Judy has been an important mentor over the years. She's always been available as a sounding board when I've been stuck. And yet, I can’t remember if she said even two words to me during my summer internship.

Her influence went beyond mere words. She taught by example. If you stopped for just a second to watch her in action, you learned a ton. And if you stopped too long, you would likely get a sharp look back, as if to wonder – no, demand – your next front page story.

I could only hope that our interns this summer will find their own mentor or influential figure somewhere among our own accomplished staff – whether it’s one of our superb veterans such as Lance Williams, Susanne Rust, Michael Montgomery, Mark Schapiro, Louis Freedberg or Bob Salladay. Or one of our talented younger guns like Mark Luckie, Erica Perez, Ryan Gabrielson, Christina Jewett, Corey Johnson, G.W. Schulz, Carrie Ching, Andy Becker or Chase Davis.

Every one of us remembers what it was like to be an intern. And we’re all here to help.

And I'm personally thrilled to see all the energy in our newsroom. One of the more unpleasant things I had to do in my last job was call a young college student we had selected for an internship a few weeks earlier to relay the bad news that her internship had been canceled. In a budget crisis, the interns were the first to go.

This summer our interns aren't exactly getting rich off their paychecks from us. But we are proud that we are offering so many internships at a time when many news organizations are still living without the help of eager college students.

So without further ado, let me introduce our current crop of interns:

Austin Fast is a Dow Jones News Fund copy editing intern with California Watch and assists in producing Politics Verbatim. He is a recent graduate of Miami University (of Ohio) with degrees in journalism and international studies. While in college, Austin produced stories at Miami's NPR station, served as editor in chief of Miami's student newspaper and completed an internship with an online news wire service in Pristina, Kosovo.

Mandy Hofmockel is a Dow Jones News Fund web production intern for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is a senior majoring in media studies and political science at Penn State University. Mandy has worked as a reporter, copy editor and web editor for her college newspaper for the past three years. She also spent a summer reporting for her local paper.

Timothy Sandoval is a reporting intern in the Sacramento bureau for California Watch. He has covered the California State University budget crisis, student protests, and general news stories for The State Hornet, CSU Sacramento’s newspaper. Timothy grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated from St. John Bosco High School, and attended Cal Poly Pomona from 2007 to 2009. He currently attends Sacramento State and is set to graduate in 2012.

Alex Brewer is a reporting intern for the Center for Investigative Reporting where he will primarily work with Andy Becker on immigration stories and with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Alex is the annual Neil Isaacs and Frank Wright Fellow from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Next year he will be a junior pursuing a double bachelor's degree in psychology and cinema media studies. On campus he is also chief content editor for The Lens, Carleton's bi-yearly society and politics magazine. 

Erin Ferguson is a shared reporting intern for KQED Radio, the Ventura County Star and California Watch, based in Sacramento. Erin mostly will be blogging about the state budget. She is a senior in modern literary studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is part of the internship program coordinated by the University of California public affairs journalism program. It's a joint venture between UC Center Sacramento and the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism.

Sarah McHie is the veteran of our intern crew. She started her internship in October with the Center for Investigative Reporting as a web production assistant. Sarah previously was an associate web producer at San Francisco magazine. She is a recent graduate of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana where she obtained a degree in Telecommunications with a concentration in multimedia. 

We expect you'll be seeing their names a lot this summer and for a long time to come.

Join California Watch senior reporter Lance Williams for a live video chat this Thursday, July 8, at 3 p.m. Williams will discuss his investigative story about unsupervised San Francisco workers accused of cheating taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city electricians also allegedly entertained prostitutes at a city office.

To ask a question, go to the UStream page and enter your question in the chat box on the right. If you are not currently a UStream member, you will need to register. If you just want to watch, go to the California Watch page here to watch it live.

One of the most gratifying things about California Watch is the speed at which we can embrace innovation. And then go for it.

Today, we’re unveiling a website built by our own Chase Davis called Politics Verbatim. This new site will attempt to track every quote, promise and statement made by our two major candidates for governor in California – Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman.

Check out the search tool that Davis created. It allows readers to sort candidate statements by nine different categories – including promises, attacks, and vague policy points. If they dodge an issue or a subject, there’s a search category for that, too. Readers can also sort by geography, to see where the candidates have been appearing – and what parts of the state they’ve been ignoring.

The site also will include blog posts from Davis, our Senior Editor Robert Salladay and Sacramento based reporter Timothy Sandoval.

The candidates’ statements are sorted by 26 topics – from abortion to welfare.

We are unveiling Politics Verbatim today with about 300 documents and 1,000 excerpts. We will be adding to the site daily, scouring news and campaign sites and Twitter and Facebook feeds. We also are encouraging crowd-sourcing from other journalists and readers. We hope to soon create easy ways for readers to upload video and audio files from public campaign events. California is a massive state, and we can’t provide blanket coverage. But with help from others and from our media partners, we believe we can build a useful, relevant tool in a critical election year. We are hoping to explore additional partnerships with other media outlets to strengthen the content of Politics Verbatim.

Our overarching goal is to create a resource for voters and for those interested in policy. When Davis pitched Politics Verbatim a couple months back, he hoped the site would be a way to bring more accountability to the political process. By tracking the candidates' spoken words, we could hold their feet to the fire when they break promises or fail to live up to campaign pledges.  

We expect the site to evolve in the next few weeks. We’re treating today’s launch as Phase I. We are up and running and functional. We expect to roll out a second phase in the next month or so – a phase that will include easier ways to assess side-by-side the positions of Brown and Whitman. In that respect, Politics Verbatim will help serve as an interactive guide for undecided voters.

Ideally, we would track other candidates and races. And that will be the eventual goal – hopefully sooner rather than later. We'd like to add the U.S. Senate race and initiative campaigns, for instance. But that takes resources. So for now, we’re focusing on the race to become the next chief executive in the nation’s most dysfunctional state.

Politics Verbatim speaks to the advantages of a small newsroom. One reporter had an idea, made a pitch. And it was green-lighted quickly. No mess. No fuss. We’ve been able to move fast to create this project because of the amazing talents of Davis and the lack of obstructions along the way.

I’ve worked in some terrific newsrooms where innovation was valued. But even in the most receptive large newsrooms, I’m betting a project such as Politics Verbatim would have been slowed by multiple rounds of memos, meetings and bureaucratic hurdles that might have sucked the momentum out of the idea.

Several other people deserve credit for today’s launch. Freelancer Coulter Jones and California Watch intern Austin Fast were instrumental in searching for campaign statements and materials to load onto our site. Our Senior Editor Salladay helped shape the project and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White contributed to the look of Politics Verbatim. Davis, who is in his mid 20s, recruited his friends at Upstatement to design our logo and site layout. They did it at a steep discount. I’m told that Davis enticed them with some barbecue and a promise of a Terminator DVD.

You have got to love this generation of innovators.

Please let us know what you think. 

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Our newsroom is growing so fast we may need nametags. Today we’re announcing another hire – our first public engagement manager. She’s Ashley Alvarado, a talented young journalist who has been working at Los Angeles and Los Cabos magazines.

Ashley is set to start July 6. She joins other recent hires, Susanne Rust and Joanna Lin, who will be joining us a in few weeks. We also landed Pulitzer Prize winner Ryan Gabrielson, who won’t officially start until Sept. 1.

This wave of hiring brings our California Watch newsroom to 16 people, including 11 reporters. That doesn't even count support, administrative and leadership staff we share with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

So what exactly is a public engagement manager? It’s an innovative, new job that combines the skills of a reporter, editor, web producer and community manager. And Ashley is the perfect person to fill that role.

Since it’s a new job, we expect it to evolve, and Ashley will play a key role helping to shape it. The main aim of the public engagement manager will be to help identify stories in neglected, forgotten and voiceless communities throughout California. Once we tell these stories, Ashley’s job will be to make sure we’re reaching the people who need to know about our work – both the affected parties and those who can make a difference.

We expect that Ashley also will help bring community stakeholders together for town hall-style round table forums or live chats online. She will work collaboratively with reporters and multimedia producers inside our newsroom while building relationships and networks with other news organizations and community stakeholders.

Ultimately we want to make sure our stories make a difference. Ashley will help us meet that goal.

Here’s a little more about her:

Ashley is a graduate of USC where she earned degrees in print journalism and Spanish. She most recently served as a researcher/proof reader at Los Angeles Magazine, where she also contributed stories. She also serves as managing editor of Los Cabos Magazine in Mexico.

Ashley has freelanced for Bon Appetit, the Contra Costa Times, Latina, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Entrepreneur. She also previously worked as a researcher and copy editor at Tu Ciudad Los Angeles until the magazine folded in 2008. She is a native of Eugene, Oregon.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

A flourishing and unregulated industry of pot delivery services is circumventing bans on storefront dispensaries and bringing medical marijuana directly to people’s homes, offices and more unconventional locations across the state, records and interviews show.

The unfettered delivery of marijuana through hundreds of these services highlights how quickly California’s fabled pot industry is moving from the shadows and into uncharted legal territory. These new couriers include enterprising farmers, business entrepreneurs and even a former Los Angeles pot dealer methodically switching her former clients to legal patients.

In newspapers and on the Internet, hundreds of “mobile dispensaries” advertise a wide range of strains and other products, such as brownies and cookies laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. One service delivers organic vegetables along with medical marijuana, as part of a “farm-direct” service.

Some operate in multiple counties, including jurisdictions where storefront dispensaries are banned, or make local deliveries to drop-off points, such as Starbucks parking lots and gas stations. At least three ship to clients around the state using private prescription-drug couriers.

Although delivery of medical marijuana is not a new phenomenon, advocates say the growth of these services could be a game-changer in the state’s pot war, which pits law enforcement, elected officials and community groups in some localities against dispensary owners and patients.

A question remains on whether these services are legal. Some local and federal officials say delivery services violate the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that legalized medical marijuana in California for qualified patients, as well as other laws. The services are viewed as a way to circumvent local regulations clearly banning dispensaries.

+ MAP: Medical marijuana delivery services in California
+ VIDEO: Delivering marijuana from plant to pipe
+ RADIO: Medical marijuana finds another avenue in LA

Read the full story at CaliforniaWatch.org

I was in senior management at big newspapers for nearly 15 years. In all that time I was never involved in a strategic, content-driven growth initiative that involved hiring and planning for the creation of a new team.

There were one-off hires where you were looking for a certain fit, and there were opportunities to divert staff in the newsroom or to ask people to switch jobs and then convince them why the new job was a great opportunity. And there were times you had to ask someone to do something that you believed was for the good of the organization but which you knew the person would not like. All part of managing. 

When I started as executive director at the Center for Investigative Reporting in January 2008, we had a staff of eight. With hires that we announced this week for California Watch, we now have 26 staffers.

Managing growth is complicated. It is challenging; it can be difficult, but it is fun. I'm sorry to say I had a lot more experience in cutting staff, and it was not fun. Truth be told, I was not very good at it. Hence my departure from two previous editing posts.

When building a team without really knowing the skill sets or the personalities of each person, there is a certain gamble you take. You rely on your gut, references, past work and the energy and passion you feel from someone who is willing to take a risk and be part of a new venture. Sometimes you've worked with someone and that makes it easier. Even though CIR has been around for 33 years, we feel like we're hiring for a startup – a startup with a great legacy. 

Our next hires will be for very nontraditional jobs – jobs that will help us distribute our stories, both through legacy media and through new media partners and social media. We will also be looking for someone who can lead and innovate around content and technology and coordinate our efforts to tell stories utilizing the evolving technologies. We will also be seeking an individual with a business background who can help us with revenue generation, marketing, branding – all the things a business needs to survive.

We are a nonprofit, but we are working to alleviate our dependence on foundations that account for the vast majority of our income. Our goal is to create a model to support high-quality journalism and investigative reporting. We have built an editorial team and now we must build the business infrastruture.

Gene Roberts forgive me. I sound like a publisher, but I have to admit that's what I have also become. But while wearing my publisher hat, my goal is not focused on making a profit. Instead, it's about sustaining our operation in the midst of this transitional, transformational era. I want to keep these 26 staffers working for a long time.

To help do it, we need to all think like entrepreneurs. Our value is based on the work we produce. Our success is going to be measured in strong journalism, credibility and unique and traditional ways of story telling. And if we can create an application or an informational tool that generates widespread interest, or even revenue, it will go back into the operation so that we – and the journalism community that we are part of – can learn.  Whatever we do here that works, or does not work, will be shared.

We are in a bubbling petri dish surrounded by opportunity on the run. And yes, it continues to be exciting, fun and challenging. 

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

In our ongoing effort to make our website more interactive and engaging, we rolled out a few subtle changes this past weekend.  Some of the refinements are totally under the hood. You won't really see them. We added a spell checker to our writing and editing tool for creating blog posts, for instance. We all pride ourselves in knowing how to use the English language, but it can't hurt to have a spell checker given that our editing staff is fairly small.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Join Center for Investigative Reporting Executive Director Robert Rosenthal for a live video chat this Thursday, May 6 at 11 a.m. Rosenthal will discuss the Center's new project, California Watch, and take your questions about investigative reporting and the future of journalism.

The chat will happen live via UStream in the embedded player below. Just bookmark this page and return on May 6th to join the discussion.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

In 2004 the state passed the Nursing Home Quality Care Act to help nursing homes increase worker wages and staffing levels. As Christina Jewett began to report we discovered that some nursing homes were not spending the money as the bill had intended. To fully explain the story we would need to review the bill, how homes were funded, how they are funded now and how homes were (or were not) spending the money. We decided to use several multimedia elements to help untangle complex concepts, highlight important pieces of the puzzle and to allow users to go beyond our reporting. 

Graphics

Working with Orange County Register artist Scott Brown we created simple graphs to illustrate basic concepts. Actually seeing the slow rise of staffing levels against the much larger growth of income is much more effective than stating that direct care staffing only saw a five percent increase while net income had a 127 percent increase. The Register also created a flow chart to explain the six-part funding process.

Video

Jewett and I decided early on to highlight the story of one family and one nursing home. Although we talked to many families statewide, the Schreifels’ family allowed us to record them at home on several occasions. Harold Schreifels had died at the Homewood Care Center in San Jose. The state had cited the home, and the owner had used state funding from the law to reduce the citation. We were also able to speak with the Homewood Care Center’s owner, Jack Easterday, several days before he went to prison for payroll tax evasion.

Radio

While working on the video we also worked closely with California Watch/KQED radio reporter Michael Montgomery to pool video, audio and photo resources. Before the story ran in newspapers, KQED aired a California Report segment combining an interview with Jewett explaining the bill and quotes from key players.

Database

Jewett, our data analyst Agustin Armendariz and I decided that we wanted to provide both statewide context to the story and allow people to research individual homes in their area. We did not want to become another home ratings site. Instead we wanted to concentrate on whether homes were spending public funds in line with the goals of the 2004 law: to increase staffing and wages.

Over a period of three months we worked on designing the interface, deciding what were the indicators of success or failure and then actually coding out the database. To learn more about how we decided on our indicators and how we analyzed our data please read our methodology.

Armendariz used the python web framework Django to develop the database presented online. Leveraging the GIS features in Django, Armendariz mapped the homes, grouped them by county and prepped the data for presentation online. Meanwhile I worked on the interface design and with Jewett to decide what data we wanted to feature. With help from Chase Davis, our Money and Politics reporter and computer whiz, we created a way for readers to dig into the homes analyzed for the story using maps and charts to augment the numbers.

On the homepage, we wanted to focus on statewide numbers to give readers context for the story and for assessing individual homes. It was also a way to bring out our main metrics for assessing homes, staff levels and wages. We decided that users would probably tackle the data from two directions, finding homes in their area or finding those that fall on one end or another of the data. So on the homepage users can sort through color-coded homes, or through the sortable table. We then also included a sort by county feature so that people could go right to homes in their area.

All of our data comes from the state and is self-reported by the homes. We encourage users to contact us about anomalies and to contact a home directly if they have questions about specific reports. We hope that this database will give people another tool when determining the effectiveness of the 2004 law.

What we learned

From coding to distribution our team was constantly on the phone, e-mail and IM to communicate with each other, help each other with our pieces and provide general support. Because of our diverse backgrounds we were also able to get a little bit more creative about how to display the information. This project would have been impossible without everyone working together closely over a period of months.

Because Jewett and I worked closely together on the story from the beginning we were able to record the necessary interviews and gather the correct data for the multimedia pieces. We coordinated with KQED for audio interviews and photos, and later with the OC Register for graphics. Later, we both worked with all of our partners to answer questions about the story and multimedia, and to distribute all of our content.

Our database came out of work that Armendariz was already doing to help Jewett crunch the numbers. Without his and Davis’ help we never would have been able to piece, code and publish the database. This was my first large project with Django and many of us learned a lot more about Google’s chart and map APIs.

We all look forward to learning more and pushing the boundaries of investigative storytelling in the future.

All five McClatchy Company newspapers in California have collaborated on an innovative project that illustrates how multiple newsrooms can work together on a story of importance to the entire state.

Led by the Sacramento Bee's ace, data-driven reporter Phillip Reese, the article found that the state's 80 largest cities and counties face a looming "unfunded liability" of $28 billion in their pension plans. It appeared Sunday in the Bees in Sacramento, Modesto, and Bakersfield, as well as in the Merced Sun Star and San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Typically, regional newspapers focus on how a problem affects them in their local communities.

However, the five-newsroom collaboration, coordinated by Amy Pyle, the Sac Bee's projects and investigations editor, resulted in a compelling statewide story, along with local reporting detailing the problem in the circulation area of each paper. As Melanie Sill, the Sacramento Bee's executive editor, wrote in a column that accompanied the story, "Our aim was to provide the bigger picture beyond a string of local audiences."

The article in the Sacramento Bee ran under Reese's byline and began with the news that the city of Roseville, outside of Sacramento, will spend as much on its pension plan this year as it does on its parks and recreation department.

"The initial logic of increasing retirement benefits to retain quality employees has been turned on its head: paying for these benefits is forcing local governments to lay off employees – and cut programs," Reese wrote.

The Fresno Bee story appeared under a joint byline – that of Reese and Fresno Bee reporter Brad Branan – highlighting a similarly grim situation in Fresno County.

In the Modesto Bee, reporter Ken Carlson wrote a separate article on the pension problem in Stanislaus County to accompany Reese's piece, while the San Luis Obispo Tribune ran the Reese article, but with Tribune reporter Bob Cuddy as the lead author.

And yesterday, Danielle Gaines at the Merced Sun-Star wrote her own story focusing on Merced County, using material from Reese's Sunday story.

Graphically, the story was accompanied by several multimedia features, including a reader-friendly "pension meter" showing the pension liabilities in dozens of California cities and counties.

In general, the project demonstrated what can be done when shrinking newsrooms pool their resources to achieve a common purpose. What's clear is that they can do much more than if they were to tackle an issue, especially a complicated one, on their own.

And the lessons learned should be relevant to newsrooms that are not part of the same newspaper chain or broadcast company.

The McClatchy project resonates with the approach we are taking at California Watch – to report on an issue with statewide significance, and to work with local news organizations that can report in greater depth on angles most relevant to their local communities.

If you missed the story, you can engage in a dialog with the lead reporter himself – in a "Cover It Live" Web chat  today (April 13) at 12 noon.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.