In May, a Muckety headline asked the question, “Can Warren Hellman save the San Francisco Chronicle?”
Turns out that the billionaire Hellman may not save the Chronicle, as he had hoped, but he’s donating $5 million to an effort to save and improve other journalism outlets in the Bay area.
The money will fund a partnership between KQED, the public radio and television outlet in the area, and the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism.
Warren Hellman
A paid staff of reporters and editors along and about 120 unpaid students would provide content to KQED radio and television as well as to an as-yet-unnamed online site.
The focus of the reporting would be local, filling in the gaps left by the reduction of newspaper staffs because of the falloff in print advertising.
The founders of the project, which will begin next year, are also in talks with The New York Times about supplying content.
This would strengthen the Times as a competitor to the Chronicle and other Bay Area newspapers, making their survival more difficult.
Hellman told the Times that it was fair to ask if the project might also hasten the decline of some journalism outlets.
“I think that’s a reasonable question,” he said. “I think that demise might be inevitable, anyway. This might put journalism, broadly defined, on a much more stable foundation.”
Frank Vega, the publisher of the Chronicle, said the paper has improved its competitive position this year by adding a printing plant and expanding local offerings on its web site, SFGate.
Initially, the projects’ founders had focused on how to save the Chronicle, which the Hearst Corporation had considered closing earlier this year because of substantial losses.
Unions at the paper agreed to cuts that significantly shrank the reporting staff and the Chronicle stayed open.
Eventually, the Hellman project’s focus shifted from saving the Chronicle to supporting “local journalism in any form,” the Times reported.
The Berkeley journalism students were already covering a wide variety of local news, so the link was made with the school.
Hellman, now in his 70s, became a partner at Lehman Brothers when he was 28 years old. Later, he founded Hellman & Friedman, LLC, a San Francisco private-equity firm.
He’s well known in San Francisco for underwriting the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a series of free concerts that this year will be held on Oct. 2-4.
The $5 million for the journalism project will come from Hellman’s family foundation. Hellman told the Chronicle that he hopes that other investors and not-for-profit institutions will also contribute.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment