How They Do It In San Diego

I am not offended if none of you are as interested in what ex-Strib publisher Joel Kramer will announce next week as the scurvy brother/sisterhood of newspaper wretches and I are. We are praying for a second coming of the written word, and hold out hope that the Denny Heckers, TCFs and Targets of the world will soon lavish Kramer et al with advertising that allows us to resume our grand, elitist lifestyles. The one with three lunches a week at Chipotle, happy hour at Bunny’s and new tires for the ’98 Corolla.

Until then … I had an interesting chat this morning with Scott Lewis, co-editor of voiceofsandiego.org , the two and a half year-old non-profit on-line news”paper” that Kramer has mentioned as something of a model for his venture.

Lewis, 30, was riding in his car when we spoke. The key bits of information — for those of us dreaming of barbacoa burritos — is that Voice of San Diego does indeed have a full-time staff of nine … with annual salaries ranging from $25,000 to $40,000. Both Lewis and his co-editor, Andy Donohue, 29 (or so Lewis believes), also write copy. The site has “one photo/video guy” and “one education/web guy” in addition to five full-time writers.

Here are photos of the good-looking staff.

Lewis comes off as a pretty bright guy. He talks about the value of good editing, story coaching and a lot of vital skills that sour bastards like me sneer at. He says Donohue and he took over in November ’05, after a rocky first half year under other leadership. Somewhere along the line they quickly gave up on the idea of free-lancing out all their reporting — and established investigative and enterprise reporting as editorial mission goals one and two. They ditched the idea of free-lancers because of all the quality control issues you get in to, although, Lewis says, occasionally they’ll still dial someone up, “but the most we can throw at them is $150-$200.”

He says their annual budget is $560,000 and that they’ve had something like 700 individual donors. “Every time we ask for money we get checks from everywhere from $35 to $100,000,” but their well-being is still largely dependant on one guy, a San Diego venture capitalist named Buzz Woolley who co-founded the site. There’s some ad support in PBS-style underwriting fashion, Lewis says, where pages are “sponsored by Lexus of San Diego” and a trickle of traditional display ads, but mainly its Woolley’s money that makes it go.

Lewis says they occasionally consider expanding out into sure-fire traffic drivers like sports and entertainment, but invariably their board reins them back, reminding them that their core mission is filling a void in aggressive coverage San Diego institutions that the major paper — the frankly woeful San Diego Union Tribune — has ignored. (The city of San Diego’s near bankruptcy was the big story they rode hard in their launch phase.)

Based on what I know about Kramer’s plan — starting with his desire to use established journalists and not high-energy kids — there are some clear differences.

We’ll shall see what Monday brings.