Journalism won’t die if you donate. Support Voice of San Diego today!
Welcome to Voice Noise,
the best place to learn what’s happening at voiceofsandiego.org. Check back each week for an update on what our reporters have been up to, what big stories they’ve broken, and what the impact has been.
Voice reporters and editors are making a lot of noise in San Diego, frequently appearing on local radio and television programs to provide their take on current events. In case you missed those appearances the first time around (or if you just can’t get enough), Voice Noise is the perfect place to catch up. We’ve created a complete archive of all Voice media appearances just for you.
WHAT’S HAPPENING
At a time of unprecedented peril in the nation’s newsrooms, media organizations are pointing to voiceofsandiego.org as a model for the future of journalism.
Most recently, The New York Times featured voiceofsandiego.org in a front-page story about the rise of non-profit, online newspapers and the work done here in San Diego to uncover scandal and corruption in local government.
Here’s how the article starts:
SAN DIEGO — Over the last two years, some of this city’s darkest secrets have been dragged into the light — city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego’s television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown’s glass towers — a site that did not exist four years ago.
As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.