NORCAL chapter winners include Chauncey Bailey Project The Society of Professional Journalists Northern California chapter will honor champions of the First Amendment at the 23rd Annual James Madison Awards. Honorees include Dan Noyes, co-founder of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, whose lifetime commitment to in-depth journalism has garnered him the Norwin S. Yoffie Award for Career Achievement. The innovative performing arts instruction of Cliff Mayotte, a teacher at San Francisco’s Lick-Wilmerding High School, will

UCSF last month forced out the Dean of the medical school, David Kessler, over a dispute about internal finances. At the time of Kessler’s dismissal, the university declined to give Kessler, or to make public, a financial audit conducted by an outside and independent auditing firm, KPMG. The university said it was bound by a confidentiality agreement with the auditor, notwithstanding that the report normally would be viewed as a public record. On Monday, however,

The Nevada Supreme Court, in an affirmation of the media’s editorial prerogative, ruled last week that MSNBC was free to exclude candidate Dennis Kucinich from a presidential debate that was ultimately limited to Democrat frontrunners Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. MSNBC, the debate’s sponsor, had promised to include Kucinich, but later changed its mind and disinvited him. Kucinich claimed he had a contract and MSNBC breached it. The Supreme Court, reversing the trial