It's not just bad for journalism. It will make for bad journalism.

It's one thing when abetteroakland.com founder vsmoothe works for free; she's got years of rolodex building and experience in sifting through mounds of public records. She has some sense of the history of East Bay Politics.

But a first or second year journalism student? Can we expect quality coverage when that's who's writing the stories? What sense of context can we expect a 19-year old, fresh off the bus from Iowa to bring to the job?

All of this makes me think that this is somewhat less scary that you're making it out to be, Mr. Gammon. A 5 million dollar bad idea is still a bad idea. The bay area blogosphere has a head start, as do SFGate's hyper-local blogs InOakland, InMarin and InAlameda. The Express needs to catch up in the online game, but in my view, this is more about formatting and partnerships than reinventing the wheel.

The Bay Area demands quality news. If this new program can't deliver that, it will fail.

120 unpaid, undertrained journalism undergraduates are not going to threaten Bay Area news any more than every independent blogger out there who thinks their opinion is as valuable as an experienced, professional reporter. The Cal Daily features student news coverage too, but it's not the reason the Chronicle is going under. WAKE UP. The traditional press and journalism have experienced a cultural and technological sea-change, just like network programming has been usurped by cable TV. You can't stop competition or progress. The public will go to the best source for their news, whomever that will be. Quality will trump in the end.

it sounds like 120 unpaid, undertrained journalism students are avery real threat to the paid, experienced and professional reporters in the area. If that is the case, then why do we need to pay the professional reporters? Are the professionals that weak? Is it that easy to do a professional reporting job? It might be if all you do is read the AP feeds.

The problem is that 120 unpaid students can generate a lot of copy, and that a partnership with KQED and a $5 million grant can get that copy a lot of exposure.

However, the risk is that the copy that gets generated and put out for the people to read... probably won't be good copy. It certainly will suffer from a lack of context. History and sources take a lot longer to cultivate than the amount of time available to a graduate journalism student. And what happens on spring break?

I'm not a journalist. I'm not even really a blogger, but I know journalists. I know bloggers, and I know political insiders, and because of this, I have frequently known about major stories in Oakland long before they broke.

"This town leaks like a sieve," that's a direct quote from a major newspaper journalist in the Bay Area, to me a few months back. He was right. But it won't leak like a sieve to a bunch of students who are new to the town and haven't been able to go drinking with politicians and technocrats for years on end.

As a result, we can expect coverage from this project to have less context. We can also expect these student journalists to have no idea which public records to look to to back up or fact check a story. You can't develop that expertise in a two year program. And if they're writing copy from day one, they sure as shit won't know that they're talking about half way into semester one or even semester two.

Without masterful oversight from people with real experience, without incredible mentors, this program really is something of a danger to the quality of local news.

First of all, let's understand what we are talking about here. The Bay Area News Project isn't some sleazy conspiracy by the University of California to put local newspapers out of business. It is an initiative started by past and present SF Chronicle employees in an effort to insure some level of responsible local news coverage.

Claiming that it is an end-around the local newspapers that threatens their continued existence is a lot of conspiratorial twaddle. It is no more true of the Bay Area News Project than it is of the Chauncey Bailey project, which is a non-profit organization hosted and supported by San Jose State University.

Having set the record straight, I am afraid that I don't see how this effort threatens professional news organizations in the slightest. The fact is, professional news organizations are already under a considerable threat as a direct result of their own corporate structure and greed and their utter lack of interest in serving the public in any sort of useful way.

Don't kid yourself that local daily newspapers are getting rid of professional staff because they can't compete with students working for free. They are getting rid of professional staff because they have to pay them and provide them with minimal benefits. That cuts into the bottom line and that is all the local commercial news organizations are interested in.

The largest news organization in the Bay Area is the Bay Area News Group which has cut its staff to the bone and palms off virtually the same weak editorial product in every community it ostensibly serves. The Chronicle, my old newspaper, has also decimated its staff, eliminated its award-winning investigative reporting team and slashed its bureau system.

Despite these cuts, the news hole of both organizations continues to disappear. Neither regularly staffs most local government agencies and when they do the coverage is sporadic and superficial.

These things didn't happen because BANG and the Chronicle were threatened by non-profits or couldn't compete with cheap student labor. In fact, both take advantage of student copy whenever possible, and an increasing amount of the editorial material run by both consists of items by non-staff freelancers. As the risk of seeming boorish, unless things have changed markedly since I was a freelancer, the paychecks received by local freelancers -- including many who write for the Bay Guardian, the SF Weekly and, yes, the East Bay Express -- is merely nominal, and none, to my knowledge, receive any benefits.

If the Express wants to push for better local news coverage, instead of bemoaning the Bay Area News Project's effort to provide some, why doesn't it cut back on its voluminous entertainment listings and run more serious local coverage of the various city councils, planning boards and regional authorities in the Bay Area? That is what we are not getting from the dailies these days.

Bill Wallace
Communication lecturer,
Cal State East Bay