What Slips Under the Radar of Bay Area News?

What Gets Too Much Play?

Photo: Nita Winter, We Interrupt This Message

What happens to less affluent people, those underneath the wave of silicon prosperity, is the least told story in mainstream Bay Area media, according to journalists responding to an on-going Grade the News poll.

“One of the least covered important stories is the transfer of financial risk from entrepreneurs and initial investors to investors at large, which today includes about half the population…working people with mutual funds, 401Ks….” writes Mercury News columnist Mike Cassidy.

Mercury environmental reporter Paul Rogers warns that little attention has been paid to “a huge demographic train wreck” as immigrants without technology skills flood into California.

“California is changing before our eyes due to boom times, greed and the chainstorification of the state,” writes the Chronicle’s Carl Nolte. “Who’s covering this?”

In contrast, high technology and sports get too much attention, the local journalists say. As Mercury News columnist and editorial writer Joanne Jacobs puts it: “How many Palm Pilot stories can they do?”

The informal survey is part of a continuing effort to create a non-corporate space where journalists and the interested public can discuss news priorities. The views expressed by the score of journalists responding so far does not necessarily represent the views of other journalists at the Mercury or Chronicle, the two papers surveyed.  (In coming weeks journalists at the Contra Costa Times and Bay Area TV stations will be asked their opinions.)

Other topics that get too little attention, according to local reporters and editors, are education--particularly stories of what’s going on in the classroom--and local/state government.

Journalists also discuss whether “serious journalism” is any longer the appropriate content of Bay Area news media, and whether the Mercury should permit more graphic language in order to go after younger readers.

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I can't speak for other parts of the media but I think the Mercury News is putting enormous resources into covering Silicon Valley --the business, the technology, the culture -- providing more than I as a reader care to read. And we're not devoting enough resources to covering education, welfare reform/poverty issues and medicine. It's not that we don't cover these things. We just could do a better job if we had more reporters on the job. We have two personal technology reporters; one medical writer. How many Palm Pilot stories can they do? We have devoted space and staff time to diversity stories, which has provided some balance. But not enough for my taste.

-- Joanne Jacobs, Mercury Editorial Columnist

What's overreported? Politics and baseball, two kinds of stories that resemble each other, road trips and all. What's undereported? That's easy: land use. California is changing before our eyes due to boom times, greed and the chainstorification of the state. Who's covering this? Nobody. Nobody covers California, merely the largest State, 7th largest economy in the world, and soon to be the first and largest non white economic power in the western world.

-- Carl Nolte, Chronicle Reporter

What's getting overreported? undereported? Silicon Valley wealth. Silicon Valley poverty.

-- Pete Carey, Mercury Reporter

The local story of the day is Silicon Valley. From that perspective, I'd say one of the least covered important stories is the transfer of financial risk from enterepreneurs and initial investors to investors at large, which today includes about half the population. These are working people with mutual funds, 401Ks, stock options, individual stocks.

Anyway, what I mean is, much has been made about companies going public, about the IPO, which with some notable exceptions is a fairly dramatic story. IPOs are often written about breathlessly. The accounts include the staggering paper wealth realized by a few individuals. It can be a huge windfall for those who joined the company before the offering and for those who were able to buy shares at the IPO price or even early in the trading day. But, what happens if these companies falter, as many are expected to do in coming years? Well, for those who made the initial killing, nothing happens. They have their money. It is the later investors, the small investors who have purchased stock in the failing company, who watch their nest eggs go down the drain.

In a related way, I think security fraud is an undercovered area. The Chronicle recently ran a series that looked at some old security cases. The work went a long way in pointing out the the pitfalls of the New Economy. But beyond that, there simply aren't enough stories about how inflated sales figures, false hype and insider information are used to manipulate stock prices and line the pockets of those in the know.

Why aren't these topics covered more comprehensively? I'm not sure I have the answer. One I'd suggest is that these stories involve difficult subjects. They're very difficult to understand. Very difficult to get anyone to talk about. Very difficult to make compelling.

Nearly related, but not quite... I think we fail to adequately cover the incredible juxtaposition in Silicon Valley of the haves and the have-nots. We do such stories, which is a relief, but I think we should run about one a day.

Undercovered story #2 in my book is local government and politics. At the Mercury we do a fair job covering San Jose politics, but we practically ignore the suburbs. I can't tell you the last time I read a Mountain View City Council story in the Mercury. I've lived in Palo Alto for nearly three years and I'd be lucky if I could name three city council members. And Palo Alto is probably covered more than any other suburb.

Why doesn't local government and politics receive more coverage? Well, it's boring for one. And we sometimes seem terrified of boring readers with important stories. I think space is a problem as well. Take our Peninsula edition, which attempts to cover every city from Redwood City to Sunnyvale. There is no way you're going to have 10 or 15 city council stories in the local section every Wednesday morning. Further, we're reluctant to assign a reporter full time to a city that will produce only sporadic news. And while that may be responsible on some levels, it makes it terribly difficult to develop a beat that will produce the sorts of stories that make for compelling government coverage.

What stories are covered to much? Where to begin? Anything involving harm to dogs. The weather. Traffic. More seriously, despite what I said above I think one of the most overcovered stories is the stock market. Not that many more readers aren't touched by the markets than ever before. They are. The problem is we tend to cover the stock market as a horse race. It's up. It's down. We include passages about what it all means, at least according to the anaylsts, but they are often at odds and of little practical help. And, though I like sports, I think we often over-cover sports, especially when we play sports stories on 1A.

-- Mike Cassidy, Mercury Columnist

I'd love to see something every day on that williegate crap, with the scams on the minority contracting. Heads should roll. But I guess we (and Examiner) cover whatever we can get. I don't see anything that I think is over-reported. I don't think it's possible to over-report bad stuff, like the crappy homeless hotels.

-- Scott Ostler, Chronicle Columnist

The issue, to me, is the shallowness of news these days, especially on the network television stations. Sex appeal, not intelligent news gathering, is what they are selling. Unfortunately, the newspapers are getting caught up in the sensationalistic trend.

Certainly legitimate news stories are, in some cases, missed because of all the time spent scandalmongering. But the more serious loss is our sense of perspective. I believe it is a reflection of a rather shallow, status-driven culture obsessed with money that this state of affairs even exists.

People do not demand, or even recognize, good writing or intelligent analysis. They cheer Monica Lewinsky as some kind of heroine while the television talk shows and book publishers lavish money on her. For what? It doesn't seem to matter what somebody did to become well known. Exploitation is the name of the game.

And many are exploiting themselves. Maybe that's why more people than ever watch professional wrestling. It's all glitz and no substance. Real wrestling isn't bloody enough. If there is any story the newspapers are ignoring it is this very real cultural psychosis. But first we would have to recognize it in ourselves.

-- Peter Fimrite, Chronicle

I think the largest story in California that is going under-reported -- in fact, almost non-reported -- is the huge demographic train wreck that is slowing occurring in the state. It will have profound implications in the years to come.

California's population is growing by 600,000 people a year. That is the equivalent of adding a city the size of San Jose every 18 months in perpetuity. This has enormous impacts on traffic, loss of farmland, water quality, endangered species, school crowding, prison crowding, etc etc.

I have done a few stories explaining this. According to state statistics, 41 percent of that growth is net foreign immigration. Another 5 percent is intra-state immigration. The remaining 55 percent is births-over-deaths. First generation immigrant women have a birthrate that is more than double the birthrate for women of all races who have been here for more than one generation.

What that means, when birthrates are factored in, is that roughly two-thirds of California's population growth is attributable to immigration. I am not anti-immigrant. In fact, I was born in England, and didn't become a US citizen until 1992. My parents still have green cards.

But consider the raw numbers: The Bay Area, as I mentioned in my Earth Day story, has increased by 2.3 million people since 1970, an increase of 50 percent. Other areas, such as the Central Valley and Los Angeles, are growing faster.

And how well are the newest folks assimilating? Not very well, unfortunately. Latinos, as a group, have a much lower rate of high school graduation and attendance at universities than other ethnic groups in California. They are also by far the fastest growing group in the population.

Increasingly, our economy, however, demands more and more education. It is an economy based on ideas and information technology. Thus, California is adding millions of people, the largest segment of whom are unprepared to succeed in the new high technology economy.

Look at the Bay Area: People who have higher education are commanding six-figure salaries. People who do not have higher education are forced to live in cramped, unfit housing, or in many cases are forced to move away from the region entirely.

We are slowly becoming a state where what I call "Cyber-feudalism" is spreading: Rich people with computers live in the hills. Poor people without computers live in squalor, falling further behind every day. In the coming decades, the disparity between rich and poor is only going to widen unless something changes in a dramatic way. That's the most important story, in my opinion.

-- Paul Rogers, Mercury Environment Reporter

Balancing what people want to read with what we think they need to know is never a simple task. On the Internet, we have the advantage of being able to discern quite precisely which stories are read. Daily newspapers, particularly "serious" regional ones like the Philadelphia Inquirer, are losing circulation. They are also increasingly becoming an elite medium, while the mass of the audience goes to television.

I'm worried that an approach that focuses on coverage of "serious issues" -- and I wrote those kinds of stories for more than 10 years-- may worsen this trend. To me, an editor increasingly has to act like one of those "hip" high school teachers, who can only get serious messages to the students if they're wrapped in humor, empathy and a sense of how the audience lives and where it wants to go.

We, mostly college educated, middle-aged people, need to relate to the interests of today's Californians, a lot of whom don't have a great deal in common with us. On our site, the "serious issues" that work best are either high-tech stories or those dealing with current housing crisis.

We have a new column called "Surreal Estate" to address the housing issue; it does quite well, but is hardly "formal" journalism the way it's taught in J-school. For some of our younger audience, the most important issue seems to be Metallica vs. Napster. And if that's where they're coming from, we've got to move with them.

-- Vlae Kershner, News Director, sfgate.com

There are a lot of things we do extremely well [ at the Mercury]... the amount of empowering, letting [reporters] pursue things, having high-end ambitions. [But] we're out of touch [with young readers]. We need to write a lot more about MTV, VH1, BET and Comedy Central. All other media go after youth. The Chronicle permits more blunt language about sexuality and minority groups than the Merc. We are so conservative. We can't quote many authors' language or even network shows." [telephone interview.]

-- Mike Antonucci, Mercury Reporter

Over-covered: "Erin Brockovich" the movie; Erin Brockovich the fashion statement; Erin Brockovich the defendant in lawsuits by ex-boyfriends. Under-covered: The real scoop on the utility company/toxins issue -- I still don't know if this is for real, what the extent of the damage was in these communities, etc.

-- Minal Hajratwala, Mercury Perspective Editor

Over-reported: technology, the stock market and housing prices. (Whadda ya expect, I'm at the Mercury News?). Also, Elian Gonzalez. Under-reported: Good religion/cultural reporting. The Merc is pretty good at this, but since it's my special love, I think there should be more. I like when religion butts its head with everyday secular life, not just the priest sex scandal story, or a new church being built. As one example, how funeral homes have begun to cater their business to Eastern religions who cremate the dead and perform other non-American rituals at death.

-- Lisa Fernandez, Mercury Reporter

What do I think is missing in coverage? The poor don't get written about a lot. And despite what my colleagues might think, I don't think the dotcom world is written about enough. My general critique of local papers, mine included, is that we don't edit enough for good writing.

-- Michelle Quinn, Mercury Reporter

I can comment for my own news organization -- the San Jose Mercury -- that I think we over-cover the "IPO People'' in our A section and in our business pages. I know they are forging the new economy here, and it wouldn't be so bad to cover them as much as we do except that we hardly give space to stories about those at the other end of the economic spectrum.

Those folks are getting poorer as the economic gap widens and they are hardly reflected in our pages. Also, I'd like to see more stories about businesses other than high-tech in our paper, stories of successful small businesses/blue collar businesses started by enterprising individuals with a $2,000 bank loan. And more about businesses run by minorities and women, and not just the splashy stories about Carly Fiorina getting the CEO post at HP.

Why does the Mercury almost exclusively cover high-tech? Because the paper thinks of itself as the voice of the new order in Silicon Valley, which is high tech. We're defining ourselves as such by "over-covering" these kinds of stories.

On the other hand, I think we cover stories about the large minority communities here well. Some people have said we've over-covered the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon with a special pull-out section last week and big 1A pieces Sunday and Monday. But I think we've done justice to it considering we have the second largest Vietnamese-American community here and the generation of children who left in 1975 have forged new lives and successes here, adding an interesting and strong dimension to the South Bay community.

Also, I think our education coverage could do better by going into classrooms to give more direct examples of what our children are learning and how. We tend to do stories on trends in education, which is great, but we should show more examples in classrooms of what our students do.

-- Name withheld by request, Mercury Reporter

I have a different take on this. There are so many potential stories that one could always find the uncovered news. The greater problem is the structure of the media, the concentration of ownership among the mainstream media that make them sluggish and similar, and the fact that the new media are so special interest and trade oriented that they seem unable to challenge or supplement the agenda-setting power of the biggies.

-- Tom Abate, Chronicle Reporter

Here are a couple of areas that I think we could do better in: state government and higher education. Local coverage getting a little better, but still very uneven. strengths: probably business, sports, graphics.

-- Name withheld by request, Mercury Columnist

One other undercovered story: the release of the new Censored 2000 : The Years Top 25 Censored Stories by Peter Phillips , Mumia Abu-Jamal (Introduction), Tom Tomorrow (Illustrator). Pardon me while I go try and do something about it.

-- David Kipen, Book Editor, Chronicle

These may be stories that nobody can get anyway, or maybe it would take many months and a book to do it, but here's my first story idea/theory/rant . . . [An investigation into whether or not ] MICROSOFT CHEATS.

Microsoft, when it has a competing product, puts computer code into its Windows operating system that will cause other software programs from other companies to crash or not work well. This is something that is just "understood" in the computer community. The evidence of this is anecdotal at the moment, but has appeared piecemeal in the news media over a period of months and years.

-- Jim Braly, Mercury Commentary Editor

For another view, read an executive summary of Silencing Poverty, a study of news coverage of welfare in the Bay Area and California conducted by We Interrupt This Message and Media Alliance.