Drowning in Kool-Aid

It's not like I'm a dinosaur unwilling to change with the times. I have been one of the biggest Kool-Aid drinkers at The Bakersfield Californian, hands down. I helped man the Kool-Aid stand. Armed with my master's degree from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, I helped bring that newsroom into the 21st century. As the first online editor in that newsroom, and then as multimedia editor, I helped launch blogs, podcasting, video, interactive Flash graphics, audio slideshows, and posting breaking news. I taught the entire reporting staff to record and edit audio and video. I taught them how to do voice-overs, write copy for our weekly news podcast, storyboard a video, and make themselves into human tripods by tucking their elbows while holding the point-and-shoot video cameras. The apex of our multimedia coverage was the Vincent Brothers trial, during which the Web team created a special section on our Web site with an interactive Flash graphic of the crime scene, major players, timeline and more. Our court reporter blogged the entire trial. Our staff of three videographers edited two to three videos each day from DVDs recorded by the video pool. It was a lot of work but well worth it, and I have to give a shout-out to then-Web Editor Davin McHenry for leading the whole project.

Then, when multimedia moved to our “visual department” (formerly known as the photo department), I took the gig as Contributions Editor. It was a step up, to management, with a higher salary and proof again that I was a proponent of the future of news. I believed that citizen journalists would not replace our skilled reporting staff, but augment our ability to cover news at the hyper-local level. Why waste our reporters' time when someone could write a moving and personal story about her grandmother's 100th birthday (with a little help from me, the editor). Citizen journalism gave our readers a voice in our products, offered the platform for that all-important two-way conversation between the newspaper and our audience, allowed us to print stories important to our readers that we just didn't have the staff to cover. For two years, I espoused the wonders of user-generated-content. There were some real successes in there, such as our 30th anniversary package of the giant dust storm of 1977 which blanketed Bakersfield and Arvin with a thick layer of dirt and tore down houses, trees and powerlines with the 60-mile per hour winds. A former meteorologist from Bakersfield wrote the mainbar and we got dozens of reader-submitted memories and photos that we ran with the A1 package. Our environment reporter was slammed at the time and grateful that we handled the story as a citizen journalism project.

Between the multimedia and contributions editor gigs, I was honored to receive the prestigious Publisher's Excellence Award from our publisher Ginger Moorhouse, who gave five such awards each year to employees who exemplified our superb customer service and work ethic. At that point, I was on top of my game and The Bakersfield Californian was a leader in our industry. As the first newspaper to create Web sites and niche publications with 100 percent citizen contributions, our company leaders and I were in high demand to speak at conferences and host international visitors. I can't count how many contingents toured our newsroom and peppered me with questions about our hyper-local projects, multimedia and Web successes. The Northwest Voice, Southwest Voice, (now merged as The Bakersfield Voice), Bakotopia, Mas Magazine, and Raising Bakersfield niche products served audiences in geographic, youth, Latino and parenting niche markets. We were set up to succeed even if the flagship product, The Bakersfield Californian, were to tank in readership and advertising.

So what happened? If we were so destined for greatness, why did we fall? More to come ...