Lessons After 20 Years of Voice of San Diego

20 Years of Impact: For our 20th anniversary, we’re revisiting our 20 stories that have had the biggest impact in the past two decades. Read more here.

Several years ago, our former Managing Editor Sara Libby, whose office was next to mine, came around the corner and looked at me through the glass wall with an expression of sheer terror.

“I think we’ve been hacked,” was the gist.

We had a headline about the new graduation standards San Diego Unified had imposed and how bad things looked.

“The Ominous Cloud Hanging over the Class of 2016” was the story.

But the headline had changed to “The Ominous Butt Hanging over the Class of 2016” … quite an image.

Did we get hacked? Is someone on the staff or anyone with credentials trying to sabotage us? We called everyone we could. We paced. We panicked.

Then our engagement editor, Caty Green, came to us sheepishly.

Cloud computing was the AI of that time. It was all anyone was talking about, and she had grown tired. She programmed her browser to change all references to the word “cloud” to “butt” and that made her laugh.

Unfortunately, when she was working on the story in our system, her browser followed her coding instructions and changed the headline.

Lesson 1: Don’t Panic

We have learned a lot of lessons in 20 years. Feb. 9 marks 20 years since Voice of San Diego went live with its first story. It was about the city of San Diego’s overwhelming financial problems and the corruption, lies and culture that led to them.

Now, 20 years later, the city is grappling with the biggest deficit we have ever seen.

I’m sorry we didn’t fix those financial problems. They were a big reason our founders, Buzz Woolley and Neil Morgan sought to create a more vibrant and competitive media landscape in San Diego.

Without such problems and the political chaos they helped create, it’s unclear Voice of San Diego could have gotten the foothold it did. That year, 2005, was momentous in city politics. Within months of our launch, the city’s mayor, Dick Murphy, plagued by a contested election where the plurality of voters had chosen a write-in candidate, financial scandal and infrastructure failures and yes, a feisty new internet-based investigative news outlet, resigned.

The chaos and tension made people crave more updates and the conversational style we brought.

Woolley, Morgan and the small first board had hired Barbara Bry as the first editor in chief and CEO and she had the important insight that the energy and intelligence of young, hungry reporters could be undervalued assets.

All of us who started at Voice had not even been able to get an interview at the Union-Tribune, whose editors wouldn’t consider inexperienced writers, no matter their potential.

Lesson 2: Hire Cool People Regardless of Their Resume

Experience is valuable, but it doesn’t have to come from a traditional path. One of the reporters who made the most impact here, Mario Koran, had started studying to be a journalist in jail. Jakob McWhinney, our education reporter, who has taken the Parents Guide to the next level, was a musician thrown out of work by the pandemic, who found his calling as a journalist while at City College, looking for a new path.

I have never forgotten that I have gotten where I am because someone took a chance on me.

Lesson 3: Ship the Minimally Viable Story and Keep Digging

Over the next year, we’re going to run through our 20 biggest stories over the past two decades. The first one is here, about our multi-year investigation into the Southeastern Economic Development Corp and the conflicts of interest and embezzlement we uncovered.  

Our first few stories about SEDC were good but they didn’t have much impact. We could have shrugged our shoulders and moved on but by putting something out, it generated more tips and ideas and that led to our most explosive reporting ever.

Later, as our reporter Rob Davis, now at Pro Publica, began investigating the Centre City Development Corp., he was stuck. We had figured out that there was a pretty serious conflict of interest but we had only confirmed, in the way that we needed to report something that the head of that agency, Nancy Graham, had recused herself from dealing with a company that had an interest in downtown San Diego and with CCDC.

So we just wrote that and then it was firmly established that she had recused herself, which was valuable to have established when we reported that she had not actually stopped negotiating with the company.

Sometimes you don’t have the full story but you have enough to start something big.

Lesson 4: Control What You Can Control

In 2006 after our crazy first year and after Andrew Donohue and I had taken over as co-editors of Voice, a staff writer came to us with a concern. We’d been doing some work investigating the county of San Diego and county leaders were telling his sources that they’d been told not to worry about us. Voice of San Diego would be gone within the year.

The writer was concerned because it seemed like a tip about our funding, an actual thing he wondered if he should be worried about.

We not only made it through the next year, in 2008 we made such an impact that The New York Times did front-page story about our work and operation. We went from relying mostly on Woolley and a few others’ initial funding to all kinds of grant opportunities and donors.

I had become the leader of the operations and business and I audaciously toured the country to tout our innovative business and how much impact we were having with the nonprofit model. But we had no plan, no system of note. And it caught up to us. In 2011 we faced the first of round cash-flow challenges and layoffs. The layoffs made news of their own and I’ve never quite gotten over the pain of that morning or any of the others when things got hard.

But we set out to develop a real revenue system based on individual members. It worked and one if its architects, Mary Walter Brown, ended up turning it into the News Revenue Hub, which now serves more than 150 other newsrooms.

Now our operation has more than 3,500 members, hundreds of major donors, sponsors and a few grants. The vast majority of them right now are local.

Every year, as the interest in our model peaked after 2008, I would face the same question over and over.

“Is it sustainable?” It was an impossible, frustrating question.

Sometimes a professor would ask it. One time, a professor did ask me and I shot back “Are you sustainable? Who sustains you? What business do you know that is guaranteed to be sustained forever?”

The question is how big and important can it be? Who are the undervalued people who can help it get there? What’s the next minimally viable story that is going to blow up? Has it already published?

We get to ask these questions because so many people have supported us.

Now, as we begin our 21st year, I can say comfortably it is sustainable because of them – because of you.

Thank you.