Bay Area News Project Editor Introduces Himself to Ravenous Journalistic Audience

Could this man give you a job?

​Last night, we asked Jonathan Weber, newly installed editor of the Bay Area News Project, if his Warren Hellman-funded start-up was going to be a nonprofit San Francisco Chronicle with a pretty Web site.

His answer? Yes.

"It can sound presumptuous or arrogant," Weber noted, but "what's exciting about it to me is really that I do see it as an opportunity to reinvent the metro newspaper. That is the way that I think about it.

"Fifteen people's not many to reinvent the metro newspaper," he added wryly.

Weber was speaking to a packed  crowd of 100 journalists at a Q&A designed for prospective hires. By a show of hands, most of  those who showed up to hear him at the World Affairs Council last night were either freelancers or unemployed. Weber said he was looking to hire about 15 people, half of them reporters, for a newsroom that would start publishing articles sometime this spring.

Weber shied away from discussing specifics of his editorial policies (like what stories he's working on already, or how much freelancers will be paid), but he did give a broad overview of what he thinks the reinvented metro newsroom will look like.

• It will avoid conflicts of interest. "They were very, kind of, bending over backwards to keep Warren separate from the editorial hiring process," Weber said. "I didn't meet him until two weeks ago. ...He didn't even know my name until after I was already hired."
  

• It will play nice with other media sites, especially the smaller ones.  "A lot of small sites have no ability to monetize traffic," Weber said. "There are ways to think creatively about what those partnerships will look like, and we certainly view ourselves as being a supporter and enabler of the media ecosystem. ...We want to develop relationships that are genuinely mutually beneficial."
  

• It will have strong Web and mobile phone presence. While mobile isn't going to be "the savior of the business," Weber said, "We plan to be very aggressive in that area."

• It will avoid AP writing in favor of a "more direct, conversational style." It won't obsess over objectivity. "I've never been a huge believer in that term," Weber said.  
  

• It will draw on a planned Research & Development center at Berkeley, which would bring together the  journalism school, the engineering school, and the School of Information.

• It will focus daily beat reporting on policy issues, as well as enterprise reporting. You can't get fancy prizes without focusing on the beats, Weber said. While they won't be able to cover everything that happens, "We will aim to be on the big stories of the day."

• It will be more of a generalist publication than its nonprofit investigative news predecessors, focusing less on politics than the Texas Tribune, and covering more than the "very serious civic news" of the Voice of San Diego, Weber said.
  

• Oh, and regarding that partnership with Berkeley journalism school interns? The interns will get paid (no slave labor, Weber said) and opportunities will be open to non-Berkeley students.

Should you be interested in applying to work for the Jonathan Weber, there are many other details that may interest you. "We are in full-on hiring mode," Weber said, noting that he has already received hundreds of resumes, and that he welcomes more.

Weber looking to hire three categories of people: reporters, web developers, and staff who will do community outreach with bloggers, other media groups, and citizen journalists. "A lot of people on the staff will wear multiple hats," Weber said. Editors will report. Reporters will take photographs. Some of the staff will need to know how to shoot and edit video. There won't be one social media strategist, but social media will be part of someone's job description.

Investigative journalism will be important, especially data-related journalism. (One story drawn from analysis of a huge government database is already in the works, Weber said.) Other topic areas -- including food, sports, Silicon Valley, and alternative medicine -- are better covered through partnerships, not by staff. Long, magazine-style stories and Britney Spears "celebrity T&A" are not on the menu.

The site be funded by 1) large gifts and foundation grants, 2) public broadcasting-style membership, 3) sponsorship and underwriting, the advertising-equivalents and 4) syndication revenue. "The goal is for this to be a self-sustaining operation by year four," Weber said.


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