Looking back, looking forward
Dear friends,
As the year draws to a close, we thank all of you for helping us make 2013 a big success. Our stories have had impact. Our website is much easier to use. We’ve got major projects in the works for 2014 and exciting plans for delivering them to you.
Consider some highlights:
⇒ We completely redesigned our website in June, making the layout modern and sleek to allow easy browsing. It has a great look on both mobile phones and tablets.
⇒ Our partnership with KPBS became even more seamless. We are a regular and distinctive part of their radio and TV broadcasts and web coverage. You’ve even seen our data analyst escape a stampede while sporting a fedora!
⇒ We’ve stayed true to our mission of bringing you in-depth stories that no one else in San Diego has the time or resources to cover: Joanne Faryon’s series on Mello-Roos (which ended up saving taxpayers thousands) as well as her series on end of life care; Brad Racino’s extensive coverage of what’s wrong inside San Diego’s beleaguered North County Transit District; and Joe Yerardi’s tireless analysis of the money coming into the San Diego special election for mayor.
⇒ We were recognized by the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors and Harvard University with a total of 22 awards for our work over the last year.
We’re already hard at work on two eye-opening investigations we plan to roll out in the first part of 2014.
And in case you missed something this year — right now on our website, we’re counting down our 10 most popular stories of 2013 (by pageviews) with additional insight into how the stories got started. Check them out by clicking here.
Fresh off the press
Last week, inewsource made national news by becoming the first reputable news agency in the U.S. to accept Bitcoins (what’s a bitcoin?). The Poynter Institute — a prestigious journalism think-tank — noticed our move and wrote up a story you can read here.
In addition, Brad followed up on his story from November about an SDSU professor who believed he could predict the San Diego mayoral election by monitoring and analyzing Twitter with an application he developed called “ElectionPath.”
Read Brad’s new story to see if it worked.
Also this week, Joanne reported there is a multimillion-dollar settlement with former employees of the bankrupt San Diego Hospice. Read her story by clicking here.
And if you live in North County, you might be interested to know what the Poway Unified School District plans to do with the much-debated “water tower site.” Joanne’s got the latest here. For background, here is the in-depth story she did earlier this year.
Our membership campaign
As of this morning, we’ve raised a little more than $76,000 during our three-month membership campaign.
That means, with the dollar-for-dollar donor match still in effect until Dec. 31, we’ve only got $12,000 more to raise to hit our goal of $100,000 by the start of the new year!
If you’ve already donated, THANK YOU! If not, now is the time to give. We can’t do this sort of work without San Diego’s support. Donating is easy and takes less than two minutes.
Go here to give by credit card, check, Paypal or (remember?) Bitcoin!
— Lorie Hearn, executive director
loriehearn@inewsource.org
