After months of hard work, Califoria Watch and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism will launch a multi-part series Friday on hunger in California.

Part of our collaboration model calls for working with students. This partnership with 13 graduate students at USC was by far the most ambitious student project we've done at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Keep in mind when you see the series that these students did all this while juggling a full and demanding class load. Is this getting ready for the real world or what?

The first story looks at the growing number of Californians facing challenges feeding themselves and their families, and how this problem may worsen because of the recession and state budget crisis. The second story, coming next week, examines food stamps, their usage, and how more people could benefit from their use. The third major story looks at the how much food is wasted and potential solutions. Each story is accompanied by several sidebars, including video.

USC Associate Professor Sandy Tolan managed the project and the editing and reporting effort. Marcia Parker, the project launch manager for California Watch, who is now with Patch.com worked closely with Sandy in the editing and managing of the series. It’s a first-rate body of work.

We continue to learn how to collaborate with different news organizations and university journalism programs and believe these partnerships benefit all involved – most importantly the public, who will have access to all of the stories through our Web site and a special site developed by USC. Parts of the hunger project will also be broadcast on KQED Radio, television stations and newspapers around the state.

Good luck.

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.

We have iPod Touches just lying around in unopened boxes.

When we equipped our staff with new Macs, Apple threw in a bunch of free iPods. We’ve been talking about how we could put them to good use. And we think we have an answer.

California Watch is announcing a debate championship and you could win a free iPod Touch.

Over each of the next six months, our staff will select the best comments entered on our site during the previous calendar month in response to stories, blog posts, data and other content we publish.

The selected comments will be entered into a drawing – and one lucky winner will be chosen each month. Comments posted in the month of March will be eligible for a drawing held the first week in April. Same goes for April, May, June and so on.

You don’t have to agree with our content to be eligible. You just have to be thoughtful, focused and articulate in making your argument. Comments will be judged also on clarity of thinking and persuasiveness. And we could be swayed by clever humor. The judging is totally subjective. But we all know a good comment when we see one. Oh, and you can’t be related to any of us to win – or have worked or interned here during the past five years.

Once your e-mail address gets entered into our shoebox, fishbowl or whatever we end up using, we’ll draw out a single winner. Since we no longer allow any anonymous commenting, we’ll notify the winner based on the e-mail address given to us when they registered. If it bounces back, or we don’t hear from the winner within 72 hours, we’ll draw another name.

The more terrific comments you post during a month, the more chances you’ll have of being nominated for the drawing.

Good luck.

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.

Almost immediately after launching our California Watch Web site in early January, we went to work on changes for our “Phase 2.”

The first results of that work relate to our commenting. And the changes just went live.

It is now dramatically easier to register on our site. That means instead of filling out a longer form, we now are requiring only a few simple steps before registered users can comment on our stories, blog posts and databases.

The flipside is that we have eliminated anonymous commenting. We believe this change adds greater credibility and accountability to the online discussion surrounding our work. We recognize that we might lose some comments. But we think the tradeoff is worth it.

It’s also going to be a lot easier to respond to other comments by simply hitting “reply.” Your comment will appear underneath the comment you're responding to.

Expect other refinements on our commenting area in the near future. We really want to add a rating system, allowing readers to weigh in on other comments. It’s another step we can take to encourage responsible commenting.

In the next few days we are going to announce a special contest/promotion on our site that we hope will be fun and will help elevate the debate. It will work like this: At the end of every month through this summer, our staff will choose the most reasoned, incisive comments that appear on our site. There will be no limit to the number we select. It could be one. It could be 100. It could be any number in between. Comments will be judged on clarity of thinking and persuasiveness. The authors will then be entered into a drawing to win a free iPod Touch. You don’t have to agree with our content to be entered into the drawing. You just have to be thoughtful, focused and articulate in making your argument. We think it’s a fun way to encourage a healthy debate and discussion. Watch for more details soon.

In the meantime, I hope you try out our new commenting system. What do you think about our story this weekend that detailed how state workers are walking away from their government jobs with massive vacation payouts? Or how about our story about DUI checkpoints where police are more likely to seize cars from sober, unlicensed drivers? Our staff is also generating several blog items a day on our California Watchblog,  And now a better forum for discussion awaits.

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.

At precisely the time California newsrooms are shrinking, the state is experiencing its worst budget and governance crisis in decades.

Come meet members of the California Watch leadership team and other media professionals this Friday at noon at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as they consider the implications of these simultaneous realities. 

Quality journalism is still being done around the state, but in a less sustained way than a decade ago. This is certainly the case nationally as a number of reports have asserted. The downsizing of the news media raises troubling questions about how Californians will be informed about what is happening in the state -- in both public and private institutions that affect their lives in fundamental ways. 

I'll be moderating the panel, which will consist of Sandy Close, executive director of New America Media; Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission; Mark Katches, California Watch's editorial director; Martin Reynolds, editor of the Oakland Tribune; and David Lauter, assistant managing editor/California, Los Angeles Times.

For more information, or to buy a ticket, check out this listing on the Commonwealth Club Web site.

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.

Every Monday it feels like our entire staff gets shot out of a cannon.

In the past few weeks we’ve produced a story examining an unusual, and lucrative, stimulus contract; a story detailing the alarming increase in maternal death rates in California; and a story this past weekend revealing how police at sobriety checkpoints are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than take drunks off the road.

Sunday’s DUI checkpoint story served as a good example of our hectic, intense workflow. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of how our collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, KQED Radio and other news outlets came together last week:

Monday: We started contacting news partners about the checkpoint story, first giving them a several paragraph “budget line.” It pretty closely mirrored the top of the story as written:

California police departments are increasingly turning sobriety checkpoints into profitable operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed minority motorists than catch drunken drivers on the state’s roadways.

Many of the drivers losing their cars at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, an examination by the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with California Watch has found.

These unlicensed motorists rarely challenge the impounds, or have the cash to recover their cars.

Impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated tens of millions of dollars in towing fees and police fines. Additionally, police officers collected checks for about more than $25 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

In the course of its examination, The Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from checkpoints the past two years. Other findings include:

• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods.

• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed.

• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime pay.

Every day in newsrooms across the country, editors and reporters try to capture the interest of their bosses with tantalizing budget lines. Our situation is unique. We pitch our work to multiple outlets at the same time. Will they want our story? And if so, how will they play it?

Robert Rosenthal, the executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Louis Freedberg, the California Watch director who oversees our distribution efforts, began drumming up interest. They sent the budget line to numerous news organizations and followed up with e-mails and phone calls.

In the meantime, our copy editor William Cooley was looking over the story. Copy editors are a rare breed. The best ones are pains in the behind. And they consider it the highest possible compliment to be labeled as such. That’s what I love about Cooley. He is a talented intern from San Jose State. But he carries himself like a veteran.

He has not shied away from asking major prize-winning veteran reporters and editors to explain their methods or their premise. He asks uncomfortable but important questions. And he’s made some outstanding catches that have saved us from potentially embarrassing moments.

Tuesday: The reporter on the project, Ryan Gabrielson, sat down to go over Cooley’s comments and final questions from Rosenthal and me. Gabrielson is a fellow at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award in 2009.

Last summer, he was offered a fellowship at UC Berkeley under the direction of the legendary Lowell Bergman. Soon after arriving in California, he began working on the checkpoint story. Bergman and Gabrielson started talking to us about it late last year and a first draft was submitted in January. I started editing it during our “Open Newsroom” on January 21.

We went back and forth on several drafts and were feeling really good about it. But there was work to do. Cooley had thought we needed more attribution and additional context. Gabrielson and I agreed. I also asked to have his methodology reviewed, so Gabrielson sent it to Steve Doig, a Pulitzer-winning journalism professor at Arizona State University and former board member at Investigative Reporters and Editors.

In the meantime, Data analyst Agustin Armendariz and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White polished a snazzy interactive map of all the cities that got federal funding for checkpoints in 2008 and 2009. They built the map with data Gabrielson had gathered during his reporting.

Wednesday: Time to cut the story. The full-length version of Gabrielson’s draft was about 4,500 words – well over 150 inches. No daily newspaper in California would likely print a story of that length. We trimmed it to about 3,800 words – an appropriate length for the California Watch Web site.

Once that was done, the hard work began. I cut the story again – this time by more than half – to about 1,800 words. At that length it could fit in the news pages of our newspaper partners.

I showed it to Gabrielson, and he didn’t have a heart attack. A good sign. Rosenthal and Freedberg continued to work the phones to find media partners and to keep editors informed about our progress.

Based on our budget line, the Sacramento Bee seemed interested. So did the Orange County Register. The Bakersfield Californian and Stockton Record soon came on board. In addition to showing our methodology to an expert in computer-assisted reporting and statistical analysis, such as Doig, Rosenthal thought we needed to write about our methodology so that readers could understand how the reporting process evolved. Gabrielson banged that out.

He also wrote the text for two data pieces that Armendariz helped put together – one focusing on overtime costs and another looking at the UC Berkeley program that helps administer DUI checkpoint money. 

Working with Gabrielson was a pleasure. It's comforting to an editor when a reporter can quickly answer every question you toss their way. Gabrielson had great command of the subject, and he worked quickly and efficiently to turn around all of our requests. By midday, we were ready to distribute both versions of the story.

Even though we didn't expect any newsroom to publish the full-length story, we made it available in case editors saw things in the longer draft that they wanted in the condensed version. Once the drafts are dispatched to news outlets, we await questions from editors. Because we're almost always dealing with multiple partners, we end up fielding lots of inquiries from copy editors, project editors and managing editors as the week progresses.

When we launched California Watch last fall, I worried that it might be a little overwhelming to have so many layers of editors. We all know what it’s like to have too many cooks trying to season the soup. So far, knock on wood, it has actually worked. And we saw a perfect example of that just a few hours later. Sacramento Bee Projects Editor Amy Pyle suggested tweaking the first paragraph of our story. It made the top better and tighter. We made a couple of other adjustments and added a new fourth paragraph.

This was the new start (You can see how it differs slightly from the budget line):
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.

And this was the added fourth paragraph:
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.

Doig, the Arizona State professor, got back to us and said he was comfortable with our methods. In the meantime, Gabrielson was going through an entirely different editing process with the New York Times. Bergman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize working with the Times, had gotten the newspaper's new Bay Area edition and PBS NewsHour interested months ago.

Gabrielson tailored a tightly focused draft for the Times that contained mostly information about Bay Area checkpoints. And he was going back and forth with editors there about changes to the story. He also prepped for a KQED Radio interview with Michael Montgomery and reviewed final video.

Thursday: La Opinion had begun to translate the story into Spanish. Web production assistant Sarah McHie made sure all our articles and pieces were coming together for our Web site. Pickoff-White produced a cool graphic showing the cities with the highest impound rates. She did this even though she had been laid up in a hospital for two days over the weekend. Now she had been ordered by her doctors to rest at home because she had what appeared to be swine flu. But a little H1N1 wasn't going to stop her.

Gabrielson, meanwhile, headed over to KQED Radio in the morning to tape his radio interview. Later, he watched the NewsHour piece one last time before it got shipped to New York. He also went over the story line-by-line with the New York Times to make more changes to their draft.

Friday: We prepared a Word document with final fixes – just two revised paragraphs that added context in response to a question from Orange County Register Investigative Editor Chris Knap and another from the Sacramento Bee. Through this editing process, the story kept getting stronger.

Some news organizations were still weighing whether to run it. The Modesto Bee told us they would publish the story the following week. The Fresno Bee said they also would like to run it later. Freedberg got back the translated version from La Opinion.

One more time, we all looked over the final pieces that McHie had loaded into our content management system. We rewrote one headline on a graphic, but otherwise everything looked ready. Just as we were leaving the office, we received word that three more Southern California newspapers were interested.

Saturday: Logging in from home, Pickoff-White made sure everything went live at the right time. We posted the stories, charts, graphics and interactive map around 6 p.m.

Our California Watch News Alert went out shortly after, and we started sending out our “tweets” announcing the story. We also posted a link on Facebook. As a small startup, these social media tools are especially important to help spread the word about our work.

The New York Times posted their version early Saturday evening. In the meantime, around the state, several newspaper staffs were getting ready to put the story on their front pages for Sunday. KQED Radio would broadcast an interview with Gabrielson on Monday and the PBS NewsHour would devote a segment to the story Monday night.

Sunday: Finally, an opportunity to exhale – but not all of us. Sarah Terry-Cobo, a freelance journalist who also helps with distribution, scoured the Web for newspaper front pages for our own archives. We also kept pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook. Huffington Post picked up the story, driving thousands of new readers to our site. By the time the day was over, we had shattered our record for the most traffic on californiawatch.org in a single day.

Monday: The cannon goes off again.

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.

As California Watch ramps up distribution of its work, we are experimenting with different ways to reach the California public.

Our goal is to distribute our stories as widely as possible, in as many media formats as possible – in the hope that we will be able to spark a conversation on critically important issues affecting many Californians.

Typically, we like to give media outlets interested in running a story a heads up of a week or two – or more –  so they will have an opportunity to supplement our reports with their own local reporting. They may even collaborate with us in the reporting.

This week, however, we had to shorten our distribution time frame considerably on a story Nathanael Johnson had been working on for weeks – the near tripling of maternal mortality rates in California over the past decade.

Nathanael discovered that California's Department of Public Health had been sitting on a report written in 2008 detailing this trend.

On January 26, a nonprofit health organization published an alert pointing to similar distressing trends nationwide. The alert was beginning to attract press attention. A story could break at any time that would take the wind out of all the work Nathanael had already done. So we felt that we should release our story quickly to provide a strong California perspective on a breaking national story.

We knew we could put the story on our Web site and hope that it would go "viral."  We considered that as an option but decided even with late notice, we would reach out to other news organizations.

Imagine trying to coordinate publication of a major story with a dozen news outlets, encompassing print, broadcast and online media. With just a day's notice, several media partners responded rapidly, and ran the story on their front pages, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Bakersfield Californian, Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Orange County Register.

Michael Montgomery, who works jointly for California Watch and KQED, prepared a report for KQED's the California Report, which aired on 28 public radio stations around the state. KGO-TV in San Francisco aired a report on its 11 p.m. newscast. New America Media distributed the story to ethnic media outlets. The issue was the subject of a one-hour discussion on KQED's Forum, hosted by Michael Krasny. Alternet also carried the story.

This heartbreaking issue is likely to get even wider attention in the days ahead, as it should. While we would far prefer to give our media partners adequate time to localize our stories, there will be times that we will have to throw out preconceived timetables, and we will have no choice but to move rapidly to get a story into circulation. Being nimble is the name of today's game.

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.

We really had no institutional baggage to overcome when we built our California Watch team from scratch. No voices telling us, “You can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not the way we do it here.” We weren’t weighted down by the kind of intractable culture that has made it hard for lots of newsrooms across America to adjust and adapt quickly enough to a fast-changing world.

We have pretty much thrown out the old rule books. Here editors will write and report and – gasp – reporters will edit. And even crazier than that: investigative journalists are blogging – a ton. Our hard-working staff has generated close to 100 blog posts in a little more than three weeks, on top of some kick-ass stories, terrific multimedia and nearly two dozen searchable databases. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video by Mark S. Luckie about our team and mission.

In our first few months of operation, the staff of California Watch has begun to mold its own way of doing things – one that stresses innovation, ideas, and a can-do spirit. We will try new things, and we will occasionally miss the mark, but you can’t move forward without throwing out antiquated, obsolete rules and challenging the way journalists have operated. It’s one of the endearing things in our little newsroom that makes this an absolutely thrilling place to be.

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.

If you're sipping your mocha at a coffee shop somewhere in California on Thursday, keep an ear out for the furious tapping on the keyboard. It could be one of us blogging or tweeting, building multimedia packages or pounding out the next big story.

Members of the California Watch and Center for Investigative Reporting staffs will be fanning out around the state and working in coffee shops with WiFi access on Jan. 21 as part of our first "Open Newsroom."

Here's how the idea came about: For most of this week, our operations are being disrupted by an office move. We’re packing up and transporting the whole shebang from our existing location on Newbury Street to a beautifully remodeled landmark building on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. Our Internet connection went down Friday at our old location, and we don't have a place to sit in the new space. If you're trying to call right now, our phones are unattended, if they're plugged in at all. After the holiday today, we're mostly going to be working from home until Jan. 25 when the doors open at our new digs.

We figured we should turn this temporary inconvenience into an opportunity. So we decided to set up shop on Thursday at various WiFi hotspots.

The Open Newsroom concept is part of a goal to connect with readers and get out of the office. We’re hoping it will be a regular part of what we do. On Thursday, please stop by to say hello. We're looking forward to meeting you. And if you have any great story tips, we'll be there to listen. 

The locations and hours to find us are on the map below.

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.

We’ve gotten lots of feedback on our new California Watch site. People are commenting on the clean look and applauding the simple organization. Several readers have complemented us for the array of searchable databases on our Data Center.

I’ve also gotten some really great feedback about the way we’re making our staff more accessible to readers. Carrie Brown-Smith, a University of Memphis journalism professor, commended us for our bio pages, which include each staffer’s list of coverage priorities and some details about what they are working on – even the stories, journals or Web sites they’re reading.

We felt strongly that our reporters, multimedia producers and editors should let their personalities shine through on these pages and that it might help lift the veil on who we are and what we do.

“I just think that is incredibly smart and utilizes the research on credibility as well,” Brown-Smith wrote in an e-mail to me.

We’ve implemented other subtle innovations – including the way our reporters and a couple of other acclaimed investigative journalists have helped organize our Resources pages. Our resources are organized by topic. They serve as a guide for civic-minded citizens, students, bloggers and young journalists to conduct their own basic investigative reporting.

And we’ve also broken the traditional mold of story crediting by adding the names of our editors who work on each of our major stories. (One reader "tweeted" that it was her favorite thing about our new site.) We think it’s a way to increase accountability and credibility – and also to give props to the traditionally nameless and faceless journalists who partner with our reporters and multimedia producers on stories.

Since our site went live on Jan. 2, we've heard excellent criticisms as well. Some have worried that we’re allowing anonymous commenting, which can encourage the lunatics to dominate discussion boards (although that, thankfully, hasn't happened here). Others have expressed hope that we would allow some type of rating system of comments as a way to encourage responsible commenting. We couldn’t agree more, and we want to make this a top priority to add soon. We hoped to tackle that before our launch, but we set it aside. Too many other things needed to get done first.

We’ve also had readers tell us it's way too difficult to register to comment and to e-mail our staff. We agree. Our site was set up so that you have to be logged in as a registered user to connect with our reporting, editing and multimedia teams. We’re going to try to figure out a way to break down those barriers during the next phase of our site's development. And we're not wasting any time. We're planning to start moving ahead with a slate of enhancements and refinements in the coming weeks.

So if you would like to see changes on our site, now is a perfect time to share your thoughts.
 

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 my first job as a crime and legal affairs reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal, I spent many days searching through dusty records in courtrooms, police headquarters and the newsroom's library to create extensive news reports based on statistics and data. I hadn't yet heard of "multimedia journalism" and even though I was computer savvy, I didn't know how computers could be used to elevate my work. Fast forward a few years later and I am combining my love of online technology and software with my passion for hardcore news reporting.

There are many ways for investigative reporters to use multimedia and digital journalism tools to give the reader a better understanding of the story at hand. The web serves as an all-encompassing platform for publishing interactive maps, multimedia stories built in Flash or other software, video, audio and other forms of media besides text.

As this blog post from Journalism.co.uk about my transition to California Watch points out, news audiences digest stories in several different ways. If investigative reporters tell a single story using various media or use visual media to quickly convey information, the more readers and viewers the story is likely to attract.

My current position at California Watch allows me to help shape investigative reports using several forms of media and visualizations. The responsibility, however, requires the judgment to know which media is appropriate for a particular story. For example, interactive maps are great, but they aren't appropriate for every story.

At the very least, investigative reporters should be knowledgeable about the tools that can help elevate their reporting with web producers or other newsroom staff to create stories that have the greatest impact possible.

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.