Two-year-old nonprofit news group The Bay Citizen has entered an agreement with the older Berkeley-based news nonprofit the Center for Investigative Reporting to pursue a merger, raising questions about whether each group will stay true to their initial mission statements.
The merger — announced Tuesday after being unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both organizations — comes after a series of changes in recent months that have left The Bay Citizen with few of its founding forces.
The group’s founder and patron, Bay Area-based investor and philanthropist Warren Hellman, died unexpectedly last December from complications arising from leukemia treatment, creating uncertainty about the financial future of the nonprofit outlet. Around the same time, Jonathan Weber, the group’s founding editor-in-chief, and Lisa Frazier, its founding executive, both resigned, followed by the more recent resignation of Steve Fainaru, its interim editor-in-chief.
“We are deeply concerned that in the absence of a C.E.O. and editor-in-chief, we do not have an advocate who will fight for what we have all worked so hard to build here at The Bay Citizen,” Aaron Glantz, a Bay Citizen staff reporter and chairman of the newsroom’s Newspaper Guild unit, told the The New York Times in an email.
But in an interview with The Daily Californian, Brian Kelley, who has stepped in to be interim CEO for the Bay Citizen during the transition, said the organization is “very excited about the whole process.”
The Bay Citizen was founded in 2010 on the premise that it could “deliver original, independent journalism for the public good” for the San Francisco area.
CIR Executive Director Robert J. Rosenthal, CIR Board President Phil Bronstein, and CIR Editorial Director Mark Katches talked to The Bay Citizen staff Tuesday about the future changes and to address uncertainties, according to Rosenthal. Rosenthal will be executive director of the new entity, Bronstein will be executive chairman of its new board of directors and Katches will take over the editorial direction of the new group.
The new board of directors will be faced with the challenge of combining the different editorial directions of each group into a cohesive organization, Rosenthal said. The CIR’s focus is investigative and accountability journalism on a statewide, if not national, scale, while the Bay Citizen, which is based in San Francisco, mainly provides local news, including sports and entertainment news.
The board, which will combine an equal number of board members from each of the existing boards, will seek and approve input from staff teams to work out the editorial direction, according to Rosenthal.
The combined groups will also have to work out issues of staffing, locations and an overall business plan, and though Rosenthal said the merger would not necessarily involve layoffs, the details have yet to be figured out.
A transition team, comprised of members of both news organizations, will be responsible for these strategies.
Difficulty could also arise from that fact The Bay Citizen contractually provides Bay Area news to the New York Times each week, while the CIR has partnerships with the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and other news platforms that pose potential competing interests.
“That’s one of the questions we want to resolve, but we don’t want to break or end relationships with any of the news partnerships we have,” Rosenthal said. “Our goal is to make it work for everyone, but we’re still working on that.”
Despite the potential challenges, Rosenthal said he is hopeful about the merger’s possibilities.
“We can really be a model for something special,” he said.
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