The Bay Citizen opens for business this week in San Francisco, and there are two big reasons the news industry is paying attention. One is that the New York Times has given the Bay Citizen instant credibility, paying it to provide four pages of local news a week for its Bay Area edition—just as the Chicago News Cooperative has been doing in Chicago for the Times for the past six months.
No one keeled over with joy and gratitude. “The Bay Citizen seems to want to position itself as a kind of benevolent lord of the manor, nourishing small sites with advice and reporting aid, while at the same time lifting up their content to display to a larger audience,” wrote SF Weekly blogger Lois Beckett. “Crumbs from the entrepreneurial table are not enough,” wrote Becky O’Malley of the Berkeley Daily Planet. Bob Patterson of the Smirking Chimp blogged sarcastically from the scene, “When the crowd had been sufficiently tantalized by the prospect of money for content, Weber upped the ante by dropping in an inside baseball tidbit that was guaranteed to drive his audience on to new limits of Pablovian [sic] enthusiasm: the best stuff from Bay Citizen might be printed in the Bay Area edition of the New York Times.”
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Says Greising, “We’re consciously doing a fairly aggressive edit here. We’re pushing people to make extra calls, find outside voices, think through the argument of the stories. Very few stories go in without some fairly substantial rewriting. That just isn’t done at the Tribune. There was a little resistance at first, but now they all get it and feel their stories benefit from it. I hope they feel that way. At least they say they do.”
Which are?
Earlier this year CNC decided to profile Senator Bill Brady, the downstate Republican nominee for governor. The Times national desk thought that was such a good idea the whole country should read it—which meant assigning it to Chicago bureau chief Monica Davey. CNC was forced to choose another angle. “So we did Brady and the challenges he faces raising money in Chicago,” says Greising. “We’re not cheapening our news judgment but we’re shifting gears a little bit.”
