Jonathan Weber in San Francisco (Russel Daniels for MJR)

Editor Jonathan Weber tries non-profit approach in S.F. Bay

by Daniel Doherty

Jon Weber has made the switch. The entrepreneurial mind behind NewWest.net, a for-profit online news outlet based in Missoula, Montana, has moved to the San Francisco Bay area to serve as editor-in-chief of the Bay Citizen, a non-profit online news startup that went live on May 26.

Given the collapse of print advertising over the past decade and the closure of several major dailies in the last year, it’s a timely challenge, and perhaps one that Weber’s long career in journalism has left him uniquely suited to tackle.

As a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times in the early 1990s, and later as editor-in-chief of the Industry Standard, Weber was deeply involved in the business of print journalism.

Early on in his career at the L.A. Times, he saw the company invest in a new $500 million printing plant, a move that would be inconceivable today.

“It filled a four-story building, and they had a fleet of 800 trucks,” Weber said. “If you wanted an ad to reach all of LA, the way was through the newspaper.”

At the Industry Standard, Weber reported the stories of the booming tech industry as it reached its zenith, from 1998 to 2001. In 2000, the Standard sold more ad pages than any magazine in America — 7,440 pages. (In comparison, Time magazine sold only 1,447 pages last year.) The Standard famously died the following year when, in preparing to go public, it encountered financing issues and ran out of cash as a victim of the massive stock devaluation and loss of wealth during the dot-com crash.

In 2005, Weber, then 44, started NewWest.net to cover development-related issues in the Rocky Mountain West, and used it to explore ways of funding professional journalism online, eventually developing multiple streams of advertising revenue and the successful conference business that sustains the operation today.

When he got the news that he was the search committee’s choice for editor-in-chief of the Bay Citizen, it was something of a bittersweet moment for the industry veteran.

“I wasn’t looking to leave NewWest,” Weber said, “but it was the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse. A chance to reinvent metro news is very exciting.”

That reinvention has taken the form of an online publication physically based in downtown San Francisco. It covers the nine counties of the Bay Area, which has a population of roughly 7.4 million. The goal of the Bay Citizen is to provide original reporting about “education, public policy, government, science and health, art and other important civic topics,” according to a recent fundraising e-mail.

In addition to serving readers on its website, the Bay Citizen provides content for the New York Times’ Friday and Sunday Bay Area inserts, part of the Times’ strategy to increase circulation by generating local content in targeted markets. The operation will also spin off Web technology products, according to Weber, though details on those ventures are not yet forthcoming.

Coverage at the Bay Citizen incorporates various media, including written stories, photography, video, interactive features and data-driven graphic supplements, but the mix varies according to the needs of an individual story.

“We’re going to chase great stories, and tell them in the medium that makes the most sense,” Weber said.

To provide this coverage, Weber said he plans to hire 15 full-time, salaried journalists this year (compared to an editorial staff of 165 at the San Francisco Chronicle). Steve Fainaru, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post, is the newly appointed managing editor for news. Jeanne Carstensen, a veteran of Salon and SF Gate, is managing editor for the online news desk and will oversee the culture coverage.

Those who join the Bay Citizen’s full-time staff “will need to be versatile and multi-task and juggle lots of things at once,” Weber said, but they won’t necessarily need to be able to do everything.

“I think in terms of skill-sets across the staff,” Weber said. “So it’s not a requirement that every reporter be a photographer, for example. But some will.”

Weber plans to collaborate with local broadcasters to distribute news via radio and television, though most of the coverage will be aimed toward computer and mobile users.

Like many non-profits, the Bay Citizen was founded to fill a gap in services for its community — in this case, hard news coverage. While journalism in most areas of the country has been hit hard by the industry-wide downturn, Bay Area journalism has been positively decimated. San Francisco’s only remaining daily newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, cut a quarter of its staff in 2007 and reduced the physical size of its paper to save costs in 2009. In total, the Bay Area has lost almost half of its working journalists in the last 10 years — from 900 to less than 500.

Weber, who was committed to the for-profit model of online journalism in Missoula, has changed his mind about non-profit journalism.

“In our opinion,” Weber said on the paper’s website, “market mechanisms alone can no longer be relied upon to produce the quality journalism the Bay Area needs. Thus, we believe that public support must and will become a critical part of the solution.”

According to Weber, the goal of the non-profit is not to compete with existing media, but “to support and merge with the local news ecosystem,” by partnering with many other sites, from bloggers and hyperlocal neighborhood-oriented projects to public and commercial media.

Graduate students from University of California’s School of Journalism will work on stories — though not as slave labor, Weber assured panelists at a conference in April — in collaboration with the Bay Citizen.

As a tax-exempt organization, the Bay Citizen plans to leverage charitable donations from philanthropists, foundation grants, and membership-driven fundraising in a manner similar to NPR, Weber said.

The project was seeded by a $5 million endowment from the Hellman Foundation, a charitable organization founded by San Francisco investment banker and venture capitalist Warren Hellman.

The Bay Citizen will also seek corporate sponsorship and new syndication deals similar to the arrangement they already have with the New York Times. In charge of the business end — and reportedly earning a cool $400,000 a year — is CEO Lisa Frazier, formerly a partner from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Five years from now, Frazier told the L.A. Times, the Bay Citizen should be pulling in as much as $12 million a year from these arrangements.

The emphasis on partnerships is part of a vision of news media that is decidedly different from the ultra-competitive, sometimes cutthroat business practices of big media organizations in the past.

“We want to make it easy for a wide-range of others to use our stuff,” Weber said. “We see journalism as a public good, and because we’re a non-profit, we can do a lot of deals that we couldn’t do if we were a commercial outfit.”