February 2009 Archives

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This week SoCal Connected looked at our how we treat our veterans. Have you or a member of your family served your country in Iraq or Afghanistan? How has your homecoming been? Have you gotten the services you need? Share your story here!

From the Civil War to the war in Iraq, Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin discusses his favorite books about the experience of combat with SoCal Connected's Saul Gonzalez.

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The volunteering suggestions from SoCal Connected's friends on Twitter not only save Get Involved's editorial bacon every week, but also provide a handy lesson in how community can work: we ask for help, our friends provide, and we turn around and share.

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Do you really expect us to vote again?

The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies developed a Virtual Reality program to treat service men and women suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

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Southern California has long had a rocky relationship with water: To stay alive in this semi-arid piece of the planet, Angelenos have stolen it, plundered it and wasted it for nearly a hundred years now.

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The numbers are alarming. One in seven female service members will be a victim of military sexual trauma, or MST. And many of those women will never report their attacks. Once stateside, female vets may have trouble finding the expert care they need to treat the trauma.

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When the economy gets sick, how does it affect public health? On this week’s SoCal Podcast, story editor Saul Gonzalez interviews Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding to find out. Fielding is the Director of the Department of Public Health for Los Angeles County.

This week SoCal Connected looked at our shrinking - and increasingly stressed - health care system. Even if you have access to insurance, your medical options may not be what they once were. Are you worried? Are you waiting longer to see the doctor? Share your story here and we will use it on air next week.

Also: The Oscars are this weekend. Are you too broke to care? Or is a little televised glamour just what your personal Federal Reserve Board ordered?

In the course of researching the current state of the California Conservation Corps, we met 21-year-old Alex Cook, corpsmember and poet extraordinaire. His self awareness, propensity for insightful observations and his openness to learning made him a standout. During the shoot he told us he wanted to learn from us everything he could about TV production. He asked questions, aniticipated our needs and assured us he already knew only a few seconds of his half hour interview would make it into the piece. But Alex had so much to say, and such a unique way of saying it, that I wanted to share a bit more with our viewers.

So Alex, take note - we found a way to use more than 12 seconds after all!

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With our nation's economy in shambles, it makes me wonder how these tough times will affect our most affluent of celebrations: The Oscars.

Downey Regional Medical Center is a stand-alone community facility, medium-sized, non-profit. What’s happening to Downey is typical of health care facilities throughout our region: ten years ago they were one of seven hospitals on what’s called “the 105 Freeway axis,” but today, that number’s down to three. That means that more and more patients are streaming in their doors needing medical care; brought in by ambulance or walking in the ER. And that’s not the worst of it. Since more and more people are without insurance, without a primary care physician … by the time they arrive at Downey they are sicker than ever; often suffering from multi-organ system failures. (As chief RN Deb Gale says that five years ago, if they saw two or three pneumonia cases a month, that was a lot. Now it’s more like two or three per shift.)

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Inspired by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, it's the state agency that's been described as a combination "Jesuit seminary, Israeli kibbutz and Marine Corps boot camp." For over three decades, the California Conservation Corps has offered job training to thousands of once aimless young men and women and then put them to work planting forests, building trails and responding to natural disasters. The CCC's been applauded by both Democrats and Republicans as an example of a government program that works. combining liberal activism with respect for hard work and self-reliance. But despite the praise, the Corps existence is in peril because of the state's budget crisis. SoCal Connected profiles the mission of the corps, the young men and women who sign up, and the debate over whether California can still afford to keep the CCC.

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You gotta see this documentary called The Garden. (And not just because a Life & Times segment I did is in the doc for a whole 30 seconds.)

Remember a few years ago when there was big fight over a huge community garden south of downtown? It’s where mostly Latino gardeners used to grow everything from cilantro to bananas. You may remember the news stories with Darryl Hannah up a tree. But the full story is fascinating and revealing. And now the doc has been nominated for an Oscar!

The battle starts when the property owner wants his land back. That sets off a multi-year legal fight that uncovers - surprise - some L.A. City Hall shenanigans, Black-Brown tensions, and a behind-the-scenes feud between Mayor Villaraigosa and City Councilwoman Jan Perry. The ending is as dramatic as a Hollywood film. Only this one is real.

I’ll be rooting for it on Sunday. Here’s a clip along with comments from the director, Scott Hamilton Kennedy.

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This week's SoCal Connected segment on the future of newspapers took a look at the award-winning Voice of San Diego site. Voiceofsandiego.org bills itself as "the only professionally staffed, nonprofit online news site in the state focused on local news and issues," and while a few sites out there might might quibble about the meaning of "professionally staffed" - does that mean staff writers tasked full-time to work for site and blessed with health benefits, or does an edited site that freelances out to professionals in good standing count? - their tagline does illustrate just one of the many, often diverging trajectories fledgling online news operations are taking. There are for-profit sites and non-profits, professional sites, sites staffed entirely by volunteers, news aggregators, online community-driven sites and pro-am hybrids along the lines of the well-trafficked (but still unprofitable) Huffington Post. To sort that thicket out, we decided to bring you a guide to some of the sites out there trying to bring you the future of California news.

The Sacramento Press

Tagline:: The Sacramento Press will be the most comprehensive, local news source and information center for the Sacramento Metropolitan Area.
Model: For-profit; professionally edited / volunteer staffed. "We combined the best tools on the web and built an outstanding platform from scratch. This platform enables people to tell stories about their neighborhoods and have thoughtful conversations about these stories. Then our editors place the best content on the front page and section pages to highlight great work."
The Skinny: Boasts a clean, thoughtful Web 2.0 design that evokes what the SacPress describes as "the casual experience" of newspapers; the site also features a novel approach to tagging and related stories via the site's storyline tool.

Tagline: Tracking news, views, and conversations in 11,860 towns and neighborhoods
Model: For-profit hyper local aggregate providing geo-tagging tolls and services. No original content, so their resources go into development and design. "outside.in is a hyperlocal news and information service. We help you find places around you, get news for the places and neighborhoods you really care about, and engage more with your neighbors. We also offer bloggers and online publishers GeoToolkit, a great resource with tools, maps, widgets, and stats"
The Skinny: Hyper local and geotagging are the next stage of content aggregation, taking existing blog and newspaper resources and putting them in their proper and highly specific geographic frameworks. An Iphone app that pushes geo-aware content to you as come within range of it can't be far behind.

Spot.us

Tagline: Community Funded Reporting
Model: Non-profit news funder. Instead of taking a "crowdsourced" approach to producing news, Spot.Us takes a crowdsourced approach to funding the production of articles. "Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate. "
The Skinny: National in scope, but Bay-Area-based, the site offers a bleeding-edge solution to the business problem facing journalists interested in going beyond Octo-Mom chatter. Still in the early stages, Spot.us will have to leap the hurdle all collaborative "micropayment" systems confront: do enough people care about the product on offer to pony up a dollar? In Spot.us' case, the "enough people" threshold seems pretty reasonable in web terms - stories are in the $500-$1000 range - but if you generally assume that 1 in 10 visitors to a story pony up, that means a story must be visited tens of thousands of time times before the magic "FULLY FUNDED!" banner appears.

Examiner.com Los Angeles

Tagline:: Get Inside Los Angeles
Model: For-profit; professionally edited / volunteer staffed, with an aggregation component. Popular volunteers contributors may be eligible for revenue-sharing on Examiner ad take. "Our content is contributed by passionate, informed people known as Examiners. Examiners are people in your community with a common desire to share their knowledge and expertise with others. Examiners are college students, civil servants, retirees, doctors, musicians, magazine editors and stay-at-home parents."
The Skinny: Essentially a local update of the About.com guide model applied to local news and events. For a long time New York Times-owned About.com was one of the few brightspots piece of the paper's financial picture, but even they've stumbled during the downturn.

Printcasting

Tagline:: Developing tools to open print publishing to anyone
Model: Non-profit web-to-print technology developer hopes to turn the aggregation formula on its head by providing a suite of open-source tools allowing individuals and orgs to push web content and web ads to newsletter-style print publications. "Printcasting will make it possible for anyone to create a local printable newspaper, magazine or newsletter that carries local advertising - all for free -- by pulling together online content from existing sources, such as blogs, and combining it with local advertising that matches the content.
The Skinny: If it works, (always a big if) Printcasting could usher in an era of verdant local micro-publishing, where every shop, cafe, blogger and school could conceivably produce a financially viable and hyper-targeted print publication. The first test real world test of the technology will be coming up in Bakersfield later this year.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in comments below!

Val Zavala gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how SoCal Connected is made. Meet our editors, our cameramen, our producers, and, well, just about everyone else who makes the show happen.

We'd like to get your take on this week's story about the decline of newspapers and rise of news on the web. Just how much would you be willing to pay for online news?

We'll share your take on the next episode of SoCal Connected.

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Are the solutions to California’s Godzilla-sized budget crisis as bad as the problem? We talk about the prospect of budgets cuts and raised taxes with Jean Ross of the California Budget Project. We promise it’s not too wonky.

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As a way for a cash-strapped California to save money, Governor Schwarzenegger has ordered government offices to close twice a month and their employees to take those days off without pay. We see how DMV employees and surprised customers react to the state's first day of being closed for business.

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Hi, I’m Shereen Meraji, member of SoCal’s Web Team. Before I came to KCET, I worked as a producer for National Public Radio’s Day to Day. I can remember the buzz and excitement swirling around the NPR West studios in Culver City five years ago. We were all ready to make a different NPR show, one that focused on real people not policy wonks. Day to Day’s news analysis would come from a popular online magazine and the show would sound like it came from CALIFORNIA.

Alex Chadwick was the host then, here he is talking about NPR’s commitment to West Coast news coverage:

I interviewed Ellen Weiss, NPR’s senior vice president for news, about NPR’s decision to cancel Day to Day before its sixth birthday and this is some of what she had to say:

On March 20th, two shows produced from NPR West will bid their loyal listener’s farewell: Day to Day and News and Notes. Day to Day host Madeleine Brand told me she’s worried about NPR’s coverage of the West as a result.

But, Senior Vice President for News, Ellen Weiss assured me that people concerned NPR might ignore the West, should put those fears aside:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what YOU think. Is news from California sufficiently covered by the national networks? If so tell us who is doing it best and if not, tell us how you think the networks can do it better.

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In the US there’s a theory that it is too much competition - in the form of the Internet - that is killing the printing press.

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As newspapers across the country and here locally are on life support, smaller, niche online papers are not only surviving, but thriving. With a tenth of the budget and staff, one online paper, the Voice of San Diego, is breaking news and at times scooping the competition. Funded completely by grants and private contributions, this non-profit sees itself as part of the future of journalism - sans the print and paper. Seventy percent of its operating costs goes to the salaries of the reporters. In contrast, the Los Angeles Times spends seventy percent of its budget on production and distribution. Is this web-only, paperless outfit the next business model for the print industry? Can it do the job of bigger, more experienced newspapers?

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Joe and Erin Balli’s realtor, James Festini, says bank negotiators are tremendously backlogged approving loans. In the story, he says that lots of qualified buyers slip away because of bureaucratic red tape. Here are some examples from his own property listings.

As we followed Paul Carlozzi, the top Field Supervisor for Safeguard Properties as he inspected several foreclosures, we met Adam Miles at the first house in Corona. His company specializes in disposing of household chemicals, which aren’t allowed in regular landfills. To find out how to get rid of these kinds of materials on your own, watch this clip. You'll also see us follow one load of trash to a nearby dump where we stumbled across a family doing their own “trashout” following a foreclosure.

This one’s been tough! Tough to find the right, “typical” people to represent typical problems. Physically tough on some very long shoot days. And certainly, emotionally tough to see terrific people facing financial meltdown.

A couple of months ago, we started kicking around themes for a foreclosure-related special. Since it always so much more powerful to tell a story from the point-of-view of people coping with a problem, we started looking for a family going through foreclosure.

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Something few people ever see - the dirty work of contractors hired by banks and mortgage companies to empty out foreclosed homes of whatever the former owners leave behind so the property can be readied for re-sale. Sadly, it’s one of the few growth businesses in these tough economic times.

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Keith Woodard says he learned the hard way that even a renter can lose a dream home. His only consolation is “cash-for-keys” - a term banks use when an occupant gets a one-time cash offer to move out of a property rather than have to go through the full eviction process. Woodard’s story will make you think twice before spending a bundle of money on a house that isn’t yours.

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This story begins with a yard sale and ends with a profound reflection of a family that’s standing tall, even while selling short.

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Tell us about your experiences with foreclosure. Has your neighborhood changed due to foreclosures? Have you been forced into foreclosure? Are you a renter who has lost your home because your landlord foreclosed?

Saul Gonzalez, story editor for SoCal Connected, interviews Jeff Davi, California’s Real Estate Commissioner about the rise in foreclosure fraud. Davi offers ways homeowners in trouble can protect themselves from con-artists.

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I felt so bad for Keith Woodard, the tenant whose landlord didn’t pay the mortgage. Keith was evicted, lost his security deposit and had to leave behind thousands of dollars of appliances that he bought with his own money. (No place to store them.)

So whether you are a long-time tenant, or are about to rent a place don’t be naïve. Check out your landlord. Is he/she in foreclosure or close to foreclosure? It’s not hard to find out. You just have to know the steps.

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