Rapidly Growing Frontier — Online Journalism in El Cerrito

When I started El Cerrito Wire 11 years ago, El Cerrito's presence on the web was minimal. Both the city and the school district websites were a maze of outdated information. What useful information was being posted was almost impossible to find. The local newspaper hadn't come close to figuring out the potential of the Internet.  As a resident of the city, a former journalist, and someone who was excited about the endless possibilities of the web, it seemed obvious to me that El Cerrito needed its own website.

I tried to do a lot of reporting in the early days, to fill the void. Over time, as existing websites improved and more cropped up, and my energy waned, I shifted more to posting items sent in and providing a hub of links to help El Cerrito residents quickly find what was already out there.

A constant theme of mine over those 11 years is that with the web, things change lightning fast and you need to be ready to change with them.

Recently, I stumbled on a website that is covering El Cerrito in greater detail than I've seen in my lifetime. (Sadly, former West County Times managing editor Bill Doyle is no longer with us, so I can't query him about how it compares to his experiences. I seem to remember a story about him having to go car to car for IDs after a pile up on Interstate 80, or whatever would have been the main highway through West County back in the day, so perhaps he would have remembered something comparable.)

I am excited about El Cerrito's Patch website for a number of reasons.

When I started the Wire, I had high hopes that residents would contribute to it regularly. There have been some consistent contributors to the Wire that I want to heartily thank, it wouldn't have survived this long without them, but the community participation never reached the level I had hoped.  There was a time when we had some lively letter to the editor debates on local issues, and a cadre of people has provided a steady stream of announcements.

But there's been a gap in information between the official documents and the event announcements. What's been missing is the news that helps us get to know people and find out what's really going on. I'm thrilled to be able to find on Patch an update on Portola, a profile of the family that runs the coffee shop where I stop many Saturday mornings (I'm the customer who gets pastry, never coffee) and an update on Gary Pokorny. Gary was El Cerrito's city manager when I started the Wire and very patient and supportive when I showed up with home-printed business cards trying to explain what the Wire was and expecting to be treated like a professional journalist.

Not long after I stumbled across El Cerrito Patch I got a call from Ari Soglin, a reporter I worked with when I was city editor of the West County Times. All along, Ari has ridden the wave of changing journalism better than most, and is now Northern California regional editor for Patch. Other old cronies from the Times like Dave Weinstein and Rob Shea are on board, too.

This not only tells me there are some real professionals involved (nobody knows a journalist like someone who has edited his copy), but makes it personal. The last time I saw these three guys together, we were gathered in a pub in Berkeley to pay our respects to a fallen colleague, Dan Reed. Dan was a phenomenal reporter from the time he started at the West County Times, despite having arrived with no experience other than on his college newspaper. He went on to larger papers, but eventually was one of the many great journalists who fell to layoffs as newspaper sales and advertising declined with the rise of the Internet.  Obviously the industry upheaval wasn't completely to blame for his death at age 50, but I will never stop wondering what course his life would have taken if the timing of the whole thing hadn't just completely sucked for him.

I'm hoping the Patch is indeed that, something that pulls together the best of the old and the new, fixes it, and in fact creates something even better than all the previous incarnations of El Cerrito news. This is certainly what should be coming out of all this – reviving what's best of old-school journalism, but losing the arrogance about who gets to decide what's news and who should write it, then merging that with all technology has to offer – digital cameras, laptops and hotspots, email and text messages, cell phones, and an unprecedented amount of research material at one's fingertips.

Where am I going with all this? It's time for me to change along with the rest of the field, and I'm more than ready.

It's pure luck that I switched to a career in education before the newspaper ship started sinking, and I'm loving teaching. But I've never let go of my journalistic side, through 11 years of the Wire as well as stints running the city and school district websites, and freelancing for the Times.  

For me, the next logical step is to channel the items that have been coming in for the Wire toward Patch so I can get out of the business of cutting and pasting announcements. Instead, I'll be spending my time writing a schools column for EC Patch. I did something like this a few years back, writing a schools column for the West County Times that was also posted on the Wire. It allows me to combine two loves without compromising either.  The education background allows me to write with a depth of knowledge an outsider doesn't bring. The role of journalist gives me the opening to probe deeper into the educational issues that arise in my day-to-day work and to share what I learn with parents and others in the community, who are hungry for more information about what goes on in our schools.

So please, start sending information to El Cerrito Patch and read what's there. Let me know what you want to know about our schools. Prepare to see the Wire's role shrink as the need for it shrinks. Just as I asked when I started the Wire, be open to something that's never been done before. I believe we as a community can make El Cerrito Patch a success. I want it to be a success because it's the news website I always imagined. And, hey, if it doesn't work, we'll find a way to keep El Cerrito news going.