The Sunday, March 1, edition of the Sacramento Bee, included an article written by publisher Cheryl Dell entitled "It's not a lack of readers, it's a lack of advertising."  The gist of the article was that despite the Bee's growing readership, advertising revenue has fallen, forcing the paper to reevaluate its business model.  While it's never a bad idea to revisit policies when times get tough, I don't think Dell's column went far enough to acknowledge one of the biggest albatrosses hanging around the Bee's neck : the McClatchy Company. I'm not trying to demonize McClatchy. The problem is that as a profit-seeking business, McClatchy has institutionally different goals and definitions of

Around 20 bicyclists loiter around the fountain in the center of John Fremont Park at 16th and P Streets, resting on park benches or milling about to chat with other riders.  A small group huddles around one park bench, where rider Danny Gutierrez is passing out t-shirts printed with an arresting graphic: a car, surrounded by a circle of bicycles, framed by the slogan, "¡La revolución no será motorizado!" -- "The revolution will not be motorized!"  Another rider is passing out fliers with links to the Sacramento Critical Mass Google Group: groups.google.com/group/sacramentocriticalmass.  It seems every time an anxious rider checks his watch, a couple more riders ride in from the Starbucks

The Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen at 1915 I Street has decided to join the chorus of organizations offering free services to furloughed state workers. According to a post on its web site, the SBK will open its doors from 10 AM to 3 PM on the first and third Fridays of the month, in addition to its normal midweek schedule.  As a further incentive to pedal in for some bike maintenance, the normal $5 shop fee will be waived for furloughed state workers.

You're still in good shape, Geoff, and as long as you're willing to work on improving the site, I'll keep it in my RSS reader. This thread's a good example of what the Pres can do, thankfully. Bill Anderson's got some great ideas below. I'd add better publicizing and enforcing of disclosure rules. For a decisive measure, you could even hire an army of editors to work with writers to improve stories before they're posted, too. Each idea has their cost in "openness", though. I think this comes down to an odd trap the Sac Press is caught in: it can't grow without quality writing and reporting, but it's hard to maintain quality if you're actively soliciting input from everyone. You'll have to draw the line on submissions somewhere, and I don't envy you the task of figuring out where.

Advocate, feel free to dismiss me as an arrogant elitist as well. Condescension aside, sactoe raises some good points, and her first paragraph largely sums up my thoughts about the Sac Press. After slogging through more than a few stories that desperately needed an editor's hand and personally posting stories about groups and organizations I was part of (and thereby noticing how easy it is for the site to be misused), I grew disillusioned with citizen journalism as practiced, and now the Press is now a steadily growing unread RSS subscription I'm daily tempted to delete. There's a very noble ideal at the center of the Press (everyone is invited to participate to help improve local reporting), but that ideal also holds a fundamental contradiction: the act of letting everyone participate doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the articles. Some sort of gatekeeper is needed (traditionally, editors and staff writers -- both of which the Press now has) to separate the wheat from the chaff. For an article on a major issue, like city charter revisions, there are likely going to be enough readers to ferret out propagandists and malcontents, but I can't trust that the readers will uncover and call out every person using this site for their own ends rather than to inform the community, especially on articles that receive low levels of traffic. To be taken seriously, you have to present a quality product. For journalistic enterprises, quality can be measured by factual accounts, trustworthy writers, and quality writing. Unfortunately, putting the onus on your consumers to enforce that quality is little better than just showing them the door. Sactoe and I (and likely others) have already reached for the doorknob.

That's not uncommon. When one paper in a metropolitan area has a perceived bias, other papers in the publication area tend skew the other direction. Compare the New York Post as a counterweight to the New York Times, Boston's Herald to its Globe, the Sun-Times and Tribune in Chicago, or even our own Union and Bee before the former's collapse. The Bee reaches Davis with its leftward tilt, opening a niche for right-leaning local content. http://infochimps.org/static/gallery/politics/endorsements_map/endorsement_graph.html graphs out papers by size and recent endorsement, so it's not a definitive left/right split, but it does show that cities with multiple papers tend to split them ideologically.

"How did Sacramento rate only 88th most liberal when it is 79.7 percent Democrat?" Perhaps because it's not actually 79.7 Democratic; voters registered as independent or decline-to-state would show up as neither. It's an interesting quick glance at Californian political divisions, but it would be as interesting to see another breakdown that included Green and Peace and Freedom Party voters on the "liberal" scale and Libertarian or Constitution Party voters with the "conservatives".

Dan's got a good start, but considering how controversial video surveillance is, there's a lot of questions to consider for a follow-up article: Will video be fed directly to a surveilling officer, or is it going directly to storage? What is the Department's method of discerning whether a given fragment of video contains evidence of crime (therefore deserving of long-term storage)? How granular will video storage be? What issues did the ACLU raise, and were their concerns satisfied? How will the Department discriminate between private and public spaces captured on camera, and at what point in the process are private areas obscured? At capture? After video review by an officer? Will this video surveillance system work with identity recognition software, and does the Department have any plans to expand this surveillance into identity recognition? Depending on where the cameras are placed, they may capture financial transactions and therefore sensitive information like PIN codes. Will those be obscured, and if so, at what point in the capture and retention process?