THE NEWS PROJECT

New editor says hiring at nonprofit agency starts now

Weber invites resumes -- nothing is 'precooked'

Sara Steffens

21 Jan 2010

Media Workers Guild

After months of largely theoretical existence, the nonprofit Bay Area News Project leapt toward reality today by announcing the hiring of its top leaders: CEO Lisa Frazier and Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Weber.

Following the exit of founder partner KQED from the project, the group also said it will  supply stories to the new Bay Area sections of the New York Times.

Frazier, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., began helping structure the Bay Area News Project last spring. Work she directed led to the September announcement by San Francisco financier Warren Hellman of a $5 million seed grant.

Although her consulting work focused on helping media organizations find new business models, Frazier has no direct experience leading a media company. She will earn $400,000 annually, a spokesperson confirms, adding that her expertise was seen as critical to building a sustainable business model.

“She's a real talent -- tough, smart, creative,” says Carl Hall, a California Media Workers rep who worked with Frazier last spring, in the early stages of the project. “She's also someone I've come to trust. She's proven her integrity and judgment. We are lucky to have someone of this caliber at the helm of the Bay Area News Project.

Weber is perhaps best known in the Bay Area as the founder of The Industry Standard, a dot-com era magazine famous for its generous salaries and extravagant rooftop parties. After the company filed for Chapter 11, Weber moved to Montana, where he founded New West, which covers the Rocky Mountain region through its Web site, NewWest.Net.

“He’s a forward-thinking person, a forward-looking person,” says Jill Kuraitis, the Boise editor for NewWest.Net. “You would never hear him say, ‘That's the way we've always done it.’ You can propose anything to him, no matter how crazy, and he will listen very seriously.”

Weber’s easygoing personality sometimes hides his incredible intelligence, says Kuraitis. “He's the big picture guy. He doesn’t micromanage… The only time he’s had his hands in the copy is when I’ve asked him to.”

In hiring, she predicts, “He's most of all going to be interested in whether you can write. He's not too concerned about stuff like whether you can wear the right necktie, or even where you went to school. The fact that you went to Yale and Harvard is not going to impress him if you can't write, and especially if you can't write in a  unique way.”

Weber says he intends to hire at least 15 full-time journalists by the end of the year; and hopes to double that number over the next three or four years.

The News Project needs editors, headline writers, senior journalists with substantial track records and reporters with multimedia skills such as photography and radio production, Weber said. It will also have a freelance budget.

Job descriptions will be posted in the next week or so, Weber said. Interested journalists can e-mail him directly, attaching a resume and a paragraph or two about what type of work they do best.

“While I obviously know a lot of people in the business, it's definitely not the case that any of this is precooked,” he said. “These are genuinely open jobs.”

Weber, 49, spent a stint as an LA Times reporter, working for its now-defunct Orange County edition, then covering Silicon Valley, media and financial markets, and later working as a tech editor and columnist.

During his Industry Standard years, Weber lived in San Francisco. “This market is an especially interesting one, because of its inherently interesting place, but also because it's at the center of technology, and it's also a community that's had bigger cutbacks than most in the ranks of journalism.”

The News Project, he said, provides a unique chance to build a news venture from the ground up, focusing on the best ways to  promote public service and quality journalism. The question is not just what stories to tell, he says, “but how are you bringing those stories into a product and an experience that takes advantage of a lot of the new tools.”

While interns likely will play some role in the News Project, “It's definitely not the case that we envision Berkeley students being a substitute for professional journalists,” Weber said.

 “We intend to be very open as an organization, and we intend to pursue a wide range of collaborations, with high-quality and competitively compensated, professional journalism staff at the core,” he added.

But at least one early collaboration may already have foundered. Although it served as  a founding partner of the News Project, along with UC Berkeley and the Hellman foundation, KQED will no longer have a seat on its governing board, the project has confirmed.

Whether the public broadcaster will carry News Project content on its radio and TV stations remains an open question. “As we build out our newsroom over the next few months, we look forward to talking to KQED about editorial collaborations,” a News Project spokesperson said.

But earlier this week, a KQED spokesman told San Francisco Business Times reporter Chris Rauber that “KQED is no longer a part of the Bay Area News Project.”

And yesterday the News Project asked e-mail subscribers to resubmit their names and addresses. “We know you already signed up for the newsletter. But now the newsletters will be coming directly from the News Project, rather than from KQED,” the note said.

Rumors of Weber and Frazier’s hirings, as well as the KQED split, were reported earlier this week by various industry sources, including the San Francisco Business Times, David Weir at BNET and PaidContent.org.

News Project officials say in the coming months, the nonprofit will focus on raising money, building its Web site, finding a San Francisco office and creating a brand – possibly including a new name.

Though the Guild was involved in helping create the News Project, no official agreement has been made on a process by which the Guild will gain bargaining rights. Even with an agreement for voluntary recognition on the part of the management, employees have the final choice. So the Guild will organize workers the old-fashioned way -- by making the clear case for the ways that union representation benefits workers and promotes quality journalism.

Sara Steffens is an organizer/ mobilizer for California Media Workers.