My View: The Vanguard Advantage and New Media

On July 30, 2006, I took one small step in creating a free blog using free blogger software.  I did so for very specific reasons that have long since been rendered irrelevant by history.  But I also did so for reasons that stay with us today – I wanted to create a news source that covered the stories that other papers and news entities were not covering, to be able to analyze stories from different perspectives and in greater detail, and to foster community discussion all in the furtherance of exposing the dark underbelly of what purported to be a progressive community.

I did so with no background in journalism whatsoever.  So it was a learning process.  One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that you cannot tell people what to think.  It sounds simple, but people are intelligent and will reach their own conclusions and so, while I started out with a hybrid of news and commentary in the same articles, over the years I have tried to separate news from opinion.

Have I achieved perfection in these efforts?  By no means.  But read early articles and compare them to recent articles.

Even within my opinions I have moved away from definitively taking a stand, toward asking questions and attempting to foster community dialogue.

The Vanguard has grown much in terms of mission, professionalism and readership since those early days in 2006 when I was happy if we got 100 readers in a day.  This year, more than 1 million people will read the Vanguard.  Our two most popularly read articles this year will pass 40,000 readers this week.  This is no longer a small, one person community blog.

While I remain the executive director and have the responsibility of day-to-day reporting, soliciting guest pieces, raising money, and managing dozens of interns and volunteers, this has become a much broader community-based organization.

We have a non-profit board consisting of Stan Dundon (chair), Matt Williams (Treasurer), Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald (Secretary), Carolyn Hinshaw, Pam Nieberg, Charlotte Krovoza, and Robert Canning.

We have an editorial board consisting of myself, Matt Williams, Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald, Tia Will, Brian Riley, Ingrid Salim and Melissa Martinez.

We have the Vanguard Court Watch Council which consists of Bernita Toney, Diane Evans, Teresa Williams, Lynn Rose-Jimenez, Melanie Carlton, Patty Zloczewski, Frank Gonzalez, Joan Branin, Anthony Palik, Cruz Reynoso, and James Hernandez.

We have 8 to 12 Court Watch Interns monitoring the court every week.

Don Shor volunteers as our moderator and “highbeam” volunteers as our copy editor.

That doesn’t include a number of volunteers who perform critical functions like helping with our annual fundraiser.  That doesn’t include the work of our legal advisors, people like Paul Boylan who filed the petition to keep the courtroom open in the Marsh case and to release the Davis Fire Report.

That’s around 35 people from throughout our community who volunteer to make the Vanguard what it has become today.

The Vanguard and the Davis Enterprise have had, at times, a rocky relationship.  Some of that has been our own doing – our criticism of some of the articles and especially of a certain columnist who has a huge sounding board.

But in most ways, the Vanguard and Davis Enterprise are not and never will be true competitors.  We have different purposes and perspectives.

The Vanguard cannot match at this point the Enterprise‘s circulation and reach in the community.  While I have turned over a lot of the day-to-day reporting of the court, by necessity, to the Court Watch Interns, for the most part the day-to-day reporting in the Vanguard is provided by myself, with some guest pieces from time to time.

The Enterprise does not have as many regular beat reporters as it used to, but they have separate reporters for the city council, schools, county, and crime.  Not to mention sports and entertainment, that we largely do not cover.

On the other hand, while we do not have the overall readership of the Enterprise, because we focus on 2-4 stories a day typically, it is entirely possible that a higher percentage of our readers will see what is in the Vanguard whereas many people read the Enterprise not for their opinion page or local coverage but rather to read about the local sports teams or find out what’s happening in the community.

The traditional media is really set up to be a one-way authoritative medium.  As one person suggested to me, people reading the Enterprise tend to be accepting of the truth of the coverage – whether or not the individual article may contain errors or oversights.

Moreover and more importantly, the Vanguard has become a vital forum with 100 to 200 comments a day not being unusual.

City officials and others have begun to recognize the value of this dialogue.  Trial balloons have been floated at times in the Vanguard, either through my articles or, increasingly, the work of Rob White who has become a crucial link between city hall and the citizens of Davis.

They may not always like the feedback, but at the end of the day they know where both sides of an issue sit, and a little bit of what is in the middle.

A few weeks ago I floated an overheard idea of moving the train station to UC Davis.  The feedback on the Vanguard was loud and clear – for a variety of reasons citizens overwhelmingly did not like the idea.  In fact, at the last council meeting, Alan Miller raised the issue during his public comment to argue against it.

The city now knows where the public stands and it seems very unlikely that the idea will ever get a serious proposal.

I still believe the city made an error not getting the issue of Mace Curve 391 to the Vanguard earlier in the process.  The early play would have avoided the suspicions that arose by the nature of the way the item came forward.

That would have allowed the proposal to be debated on its merits – and it had a lot of merits.  We would have been able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal and the proposers might have been able to fix and address some concerns.

As I have told numerous people I have met with in the last two weeks – you cannot be afraid of getting feedback.  You get feedback no matter how you approach an issue.  It comes when the item lands on the council agenda and when it gets discussed at council.  You can control the timing of the delivery and then get a sense for where the public stands and whether you can fix some of the problems identified.

Think about it, people pay $50,000 to run good polls – and they can get a lot of feedback for free through vehicles like the Vanguard.

Is it representative of everyone’s opinion?  By no means, but listening to people like Frankly, Matt Williams, Don Shor, Michael Harrington, Mr. Toad and others gives you a very real sense for what a broad array of people would like.

The one thing I would improve is that, while we get thousands of readers each day, we get may 30 to 50 different people commenting at any one time.  I would love to see more voices.  It can be daunting and the people who post are clearly very intelligent but also opinionated – but everyone’s voice is important and we try to take safeguards to protect people and keep the discussion clean and civil.

Are we perfect?  By no means.  But I think we’ve come a long way in the last seven years and I’m very proud of what this endeavor has created.

—David M. Greenwald reporting