For much of May the non-profit SF Public Press posted a series of stories, supported by hard survey data, about the implosion of Bay Area journalism jobs over the last decade. Yesterday, in an un-bylined piece titled, “Reporting on Ourselves,” SFPP discloses after the fact that research for the project was funded in part from a subcontract with the U. S. Department of Labor. The news outlet doesn’t say how much money it received from the feds, but says it didn’t use federal dollars to pay journalists. An excerpt:
The Public Press won a subcontract on a federal Department of Labor study of displacement of journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area during the last decade, in collaboration with Natelson Dale Group in Yorba Linda, California.
The contractor on the “Research Study of Workforce Dislocation Among San Francisco Bay Area Journalists” was the North Valley Job Training Consortium, or NOVA, whose aim was to provide the legions of jobless journalists opportunities to improve their skills or transition to other kinds of work.
The Public Press was paid to hire and manage a team of researchers early this year to track down thousands of current and former Bay Area journalists, of whom more than 700 completed a detailed online survey called the San Francisco Bay Area Journalist Census. Visit journalistcensus.org to read the full report.
We used the expertise we acquired through that research to launch a more targeted explanatory project about the state of the local news media.
