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Coalition News

Palo Alto’s trio of newspapers staying alive in hard times

FAC March 1, 2010

The online news boom and the busted U.S. economy have combined to make community newspapers an endangered species.  So how does Palo Alto manage to support three newspapers–The Palo Alto Weekly, The Daily Post and The Daily News? The New York Times asked that question of the newspapers’ publishers, including FAC board member Bill Johnson, who is publisher of the Weekly, as well as President and CEO of Embarcadero Media which owns the Weekly and

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Haiti Rewired: Wired.com tackles Haiti’s reconstruction with online collaboration

FAC February 5, 2010

Haiti Rewired launched by Wired.com following the January earthquake, is an innovative response to the problem of on-going disaster relief. Editor-in-Chief Evan Hansen, a member of FAC’s board, calls the project an online “collaboration of writers, editors, technologists, researchers, geographers, infrastructure specialists, aid groups and others” dedicated to rebooting Haiti’s future. Haiti Rewired’s Mission Statement Posted by Evan Hansen on January 22, 2010 at 7:30pm View Evan Hansen’s blog Quake-ravaged Haiti faces a long-term emergency,

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Pultizer Prize-winning reporter describes quest for truth in Las Vegas construction deaths

FAC November 10, 2009

By Donal Brown Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Berzon said that favorable circumstances set the stage for the stories on Las Vegas construction deaths that earned her a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service when she was with the Las Vegas Sun. It is clear, though, that her success in the project derived centrally from her determined questioning: Why were there so many workers dying on the strip? And why were the companies able to

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Court rules CA counties must disclose pension amounts paid to government retirees

Peter Scheer November 6, 2009

Nov 6, 2009—In a case filed by the First Amendment Coalition, the Modesto Bee and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, a California Superior Court has ruled that county governments, upon request, must disclose–by name–their retirees’ pension payments. The Superior Court for Stanislaus County reasoned that the public interest in access to government employees’ pensions outweighs the public interest in protecting the confidentiality of that information. In 2007 the California Supreme Court ruled that government employees’

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First Amendment panel finds promise, pitfalls in social media

FAC November 3, 2009

By Donal Brown The panel on journalists and social media at the First Amendment Coatition Assembly offered wise advice and a few emphatic warnings, chief among them: everything a journalist puts up on Twitter or Facebook or other social media is public. Speaking at the assembly October 24 in Los Angeles on the panel entitled “Twitter with Care: Journalists and Social Media,” prominent Southern California media attorney Kelli Sager suggests that journalists put nothing up

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