The Bakersfield Californian and Blogging the Courtroom CSJ

CSJ- 08- 0003.0 • • The Bakersfield Californian and Blogging the Courtroom Jessica Logan, a 29-year-old reporter for the Bakersfield Californian, had covered courts and reported on a murder trial before. But in winter 2007, she encountered something new and disturbing. It had nothing to do with the trial she was covering. Rather, she was concerned about what her editors were asking her to write. Logan’s editors wanted her—in addition to filing her daily and weekend stories for the newspaper—to blog from the courtroom for the Californian’s website. Blogging was nothing new, neither for the Californian nor the industry. Many newspapers carried online “blogs” or “web logs”—most of them written by staff reporters. The subject and content of these blogs varied widely. Some were musings or observations akin to a “reporter’s notebook”; others were updates of breaking news. Some reporters and columnists used their names and included personal opinions in their blogs; others did neither. Reporters often wrote blogs in a more conversational, relaxed style than “just the facts” traditional journalism allowed. But the request made Logan uncomfortable. It was not the additional work-- although she worried that writing a blog might distract her and she could miss important interactions in the courtroom. More fundamentally, she questioned the wisdom of asking a reporter to provide a web audience with a stream of observations on a story she was covering—especially a complex and nuanced legal story. Was the Californian offering a trial blog just because technology allowed it? What was the added value for readers? How could reporters maintain credibility as reliable narrators if their blogs were riddled with errors? What advantages, if any, were there to providing hourly updates--more like a wire service than a newspaper? Might blogging take up so much of a journalist’s time and attention that he would give short shrift to longer analytical or overview pieces? This case was written by Delia Flores for the Knight Case Studies Initiative, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. The faculty sponsor was Professor Michael Shapiro. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) produced the multimedia, online product. Josh Stanley was the project coordinator, and Zarina Mustapha was the website designer. Funding was provided by the Knight Foundation. (01/2008) Blogging the Courtroom __________________________________________________ CSJ-08-0003.0 Bakersfield and its Paper The trial blog was only the latest step in the evolution of an unusually tech- savvy newsroom. Although its size and location did not make it an obvious incubator for cutting-edge journalism, the Californian had been one of the early adopters of Web technology. Bakersfield, California, the seat of Kern County, lay some 100 miles north of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley. Greater Bakersfield was home to some 480,000 people, about 40 percent of them Hispanic. Lush green irrigated fields were separated by dusty patches of land punctuated with oil derricks bobbing up and down like so many metal birds. Though the oil economy was fading by 2007, Bakersfield was still home to two of the country’s largest working oil fields. Thanks to its geography and weather patterns, in 2006 the American Lung Association ranked Bakersfield as the most ozone-polluted city in the country; it ranked the city second in short-term and year-round particle pollution. Its downtown was quiet, hazy in the almost constant sunshine, and decidedly small town. A family paper. Bakersfield’s hometown paper had been in the same family for four generations. The Californian was located in a lovingly restored 19th-century Moroccan- inspired building. Ginger Moorhouse officially became publisher in 1989, but for personal reasons was unable to assume day-to-day responsibility for several years. Moorhouse finally returned to Bakersfield in 1994. At the time, the paper had a respectable daily circulation of 60,000—but Moorhouse thought it could do better. She wanted aggressive reporting and well-written stories, and she was not afraid to go out on a limb to get them. In January 2003, for example, the paper ran an eight-page series entitled “The Lords of Bakersfield” that detailed a sex scandal involving not only local business leaders, but the paper’s former publisher (and Moorhouse’s late brother) Ted Fritts as well. While the Californian over the years had encountered sporadic competition from the Los Angeles Times, by the mid-1990s its editors began to see reporting on the Internet, as well as television news, as the real competition. In November 1993, CEO Michael Fisch hired as managing editor for nights (another managing editor covered days) 39- year-old Mike Jenner, a former reporter and editor at papers including the Hartford Courant and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In mid-1994, Moorhouse and Fisch hired Richard Beene as executive editor, and shortly after Jenner became sole managing editor. Jenner, Moorhouse and Beene understood that “the Internet was going to be a real play and we needed to own it,” says Jenner. “We needed to be the local voice and needed to make sure that we staked out our territory early.” The paper went online on October 1, 1995. Its website was called Bakersfield.com.1 1 The paper at first partnered with a local computer consultant to run the electronic bulletin board. 2 Blogging the Courtroom __________________________________________________ CSJ-08-0003.0 Early to the Web “Bakersfield.com was not really much for a couple of years,” admits Jenner. 2 The Californian’s initial online offerings were experimental and not always successful. It solicited online advertisements from real estate agents and car dealers, but both groups doubted the medium could make them money and shunned the paper’s website. The Californian also tried a job website. “We had a button that said ‘post your resumes’ and well, people were sending us resumes. But we didn’t know what to do with them,” Jenner says. Another failed experiment was BakersfieldBabies.com, a website intended for proud parents to share news about their kids. “But people were freaked out,” Jenner says; anxious parents feared everything from identity theft to child pornography. However, Jenner--with Executive Editor Beene’s active encouragement-- persevered. His mandate was large: turn Bakersfield.com into a gateway for Internet activities including email, search engines, reader forums, or shopping. His goal was to make the site “kind of the bulletin board of the community, but also this big, huge cash cow revenue stream,” he says. In 1997, when he was promoted to the position of vice president for new media, Jenner hired about 10 people for a New Media department. But the newsroom continued to work on a traditional print-centric model. “We had a few people up in the newsroom who were a little geekier and more into [the Internet as] a tech, ‘isn’t this cool’ kind of thing,” Jenner says. For the most part, however, the New Media group and the newsroom remained separate. Any idea about integrating them more closely died in 2000 along with the bursting of the “dot.com bubble.” Pull back. With the collapse of what had been a booming (and overly speculative) technology sector, the Californian in 2000 redefined its commitment to the website. “We pulled back and said, ‘Okay, we still believe in this, but not now. We can’t invest at the same level,’” recalls Jenner, whom Moorhouse had promoted to executive editor in 1999. “So we said, we’re going to back off.” The company drastically cut back the New Media group.3 There the website remained until 2004. That year, while preparing a report for the Californian’s annual executive staff retreat, Jenner studied current traffic statistics for the paper’s website. “They were phenomenal. I mean phenomenal,” he says. “While we were sleeping, it had just kept growing.” With no deliberate effort on the paper’s part, the site was drawing viewers clamoring for more information. Jenner adds: Here we were, knocking our heads against the wall trying to raise circulation [for the newspaper] or keep gross circulation the 2 Author’s interview with Mike Jenner on May 14, 2007 in Bakersfield, California. All further quotations from Jenner, unless otherwise attributed, are from this interview. 3 A skeleton staff of two remained. 3 Blogging the Courtroom __________________________________________________ CSJ-08-0003.0 same. And while we were cracking our heads against the wall, and doing zero to the website, there was huge growth. At that point, Bakersfield.com was still essentially an electronic version of the paper. “It was just one big shovel dump at night,” Jenner says of the website’s content. “There was no video, no community activity, no blogs.” The paper’s website wasn’t even user friendly. “We had this really cumbersome registration process where you had to basically give your DNA to get in. It was too much. Still, people would almost do that just to get in,” he says. Back in the Game Executive Editor Jenner realized that, if the website was attracting readers without even trying, he needed to reevaluate what the Californian was doing across the board. The time was not far distant, he suspected, when the website would eclipse the paper both in terms of readers and advertisers. Publisher Moorhouse agreed. “She realized earlier than most that there was going to be a day when the paper would become a niche publication,” says Jenner. Jenner and Assistant Managing Editor Logan Molen sat down to study the website’s use patterns. They discovered only a small crossover between long-time Californian readers and Bakersfield.com users, those Jenner calls a “new world” of readers.

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