Friday, December 19, 2008

We've made the news

It seems most of the OC media, except the Daily Pilot, thinks our experiment that's underway to see if the Newport-Mesa community will fund a nonprofit to produce local daily news is newsworthy. We've been written up in the local blogs (thanks, folks!), Orange County Business Journal, the OC Weekly, and today in the Orange County Register. Here are some excerpts from the Register's piece by Jeff Overly.

Troubled by the bad fortunes of the local newspaper they once led, two old hands of community journalism are trying to launch a nonprofit publication covering Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Tom Johnson and William Lobdell – a former publisher and a former editor of the Daily Pilot, respectively – this week sent an e-mail blast seeking publicity and financial pledges for an online news operation and weekly paper dedicated to their old journalistic stomping grounds.

In the note, the duo said their vision of a "first-rate news-gathering team" would require $200,000 in startup costs, $200,000 in annual fundraising and an unspecified amount of cash raised by selling ads.

[snip]

Once an award-winning daily that served as a farm team for major metropolitan papers, the Pilot now operates with a skeleton crew that scrambles to fill the pages and earlier this year stopped publishing on Mondays, traditionally a light advertising day.

"When I was there, it was one of the best community newspapers in the state," said Lobdell, the paper's editor in the 1990s and until recently a Los Angeles Times reporter. "The people that are working there are great people. It's just that there are not enough of them."

The pair said they inquired about purchasing the paper with the Pilot's owner, Tribune Co., but received no response. Establishing a competitor to the Pilot isn't done lightly, Lobdell said.

"It's painful," Lobdell said. "It's something we're both doing, I think, with a bit of a heavy heart."

"I probably love the Pilot more than anybody else," added Johnson, who was at the paper 17 years before resigning this summer after protesting layoffs. "It pained me to walk away from it. I wish I could get the Daily Pilot and do what's right with it for the community."

[snip]

A "tremendous response" greeted the e-mail blast, Johnson said, and the coming weeks and months will see the proposed publication's business plan being presented to various local groups and leaders. It's too early to tell when, if ever, the news operation will debut, he added.

Everything now depends on whether community residents "vote with their pocketbooks," Lobdell said.

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