A group of seasoned Bay Area journalists has launched Coyote Media Collective, a worker-owned newsroom inspired by alt-weeklies, aiming to revive independent local reporting with deep stories, sharp opinions, and creative multimedia across the region.

Founded this year by 11 veteran reporters, podcasters, photographers, and editors, the collective includes contributors to national publications such as The Guardian, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, NPR, Pitchfork, and ProPublica, "as well as pretty much every local publication in the Bay Area:" Amir Aziz, Nuala Bishari, Alan Chazaro, Reo Eveleth, Estefany Gonzalez, Rahawa Haile, Soleil Ho, Daniel Lavery, Cecilia Lei, Emma Silvers and Supriya Yelimeli.

As KQED reports, the group was formed out of frustration with the limitations of corporate media with the goal of prioritizing editorial freedom and local relevance.

The project quickly gained public support after it was announced in early June — raising over 75% of its $80,000 launch goal within two days and now targeting $150,000 to support fair pay and consistent output. All content will be free to read, with optional memberships offering perks and expanded access.

Coyote’s coverage will span the Bay Area, focusing on investigative reporting, arts and culture, experimental formats, and pointed commentary. Planned features include a Craigslist-style “Meet Cute Market” and a Bay Area events calendar. The name references the trickster of Pomo mythology, the adaptable local animal, and COYOTE, the 1970s sex workers’ rights group.

The launch comes amid a national shift toward worker-owned media as an alternative to ad-driven, billionaire-backed, or algorithm-focused newsrooms. Drawing inspiration from the alt-weekly tradition, Coyote’s founders aim to bring a mix of rigor and irreverence to local journalism. The site is expected to launch later this summer.

Image: Coyote Media Collective on Facebook

The freelance news videographer at the center of the Jeff Adachi death report scandal is filing a complaint Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court following a controversial May 10 raid at his home by the SFPD.

Freelance "stringer" Bryan Carmody, who makes his living showing up first to crime scenes and selling his video footage to local news stations (you may be familiar with the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal film Nightcrawler?), stands accused by the SFPD of peddling a "stolen" police report — which was, he says, given to him by a source he has at the department. The report, along with footage Carmody shot outside the apartment where Public Defender Jeff Adachi died suddenly on February 22, led to unnecessarily lurid coverage of Adachi's death — something many saw as petty retaliation by the police who were often at odds with, or under investigation by Adachi over the years.

Under political pressure from the mayor and Board of Supervisors, the SFPD says it is trying to track down the leak in the department, which is why it obtained a search warrant to raid Carmody's apartment, sledgehammer in hand. While two judges signed off on the warrant, the actions by police have drawn national outrage due to the implications for freedom of the press, and the ability of journalists to protect their sources. And while some suggested that Carmody might not qualify as a "journalist," California's Shield Law should have protected him — and an editorial last week by Chronicle editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper points out both that Carmody had a hard-to-obtain SFPD press pass, and that the Chronicle was not raided despite their having obtained the same police report, possibly from the same source.

As the Associated Press reports today, Carmody's complaint argues that "the free flow of information to the public is jeopardized" when such raids are allowed to happen. The AP will also be filing an amicus brief in the case on Carmody's behalf — many other news organizations and first-amendment advocates are likely to follow suit. Update: The AP reports that an attorney for the SFPD told the court Tuesday that Carmody would get all of his possessions back.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon came out against the SFPD raid on Twitter on Monday, saying he "can’t imagine a situation in which a search warrant would be appropriate" for such an action. "My office has not seen the warrant or the facts upon which it was based," he said, "[But] Seizing the entire haystack to find the needle risks violating the confidences Mr. Carmody owes to all his sources, not just the person who leaked the police report."

Mayor London Breed, who initially stood behind SFPD Chief Bill Scott's defense of the raid, walked back her support on Sunday, saying, "I want the SFPD to get to the bottom of this. But I am not okay with police raids on reporters. We need to do better."

Previously: Media Furor Grows After SFPD's Raid Of Journalist's Home Seeking Adachi Leak

Enjoyed sitting down w/@jack today to announce @Bloomberg's new global 24/7 live news network w/@Twitter https://t.co/zEY9jnUHss #TheNewNews pic.twitter.com/wwkoxNQm5b

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) May 1, 2017

Michael Bloomberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced today that they are partnering to bring a 24/7 streaming news service to Twitter later this year, something that will likely be to the benefit of both companies — Twitter in bolstering video ad revenue, and Bloomberg in widening its reach. As the Wall Street Journal reports via an event Monday hosted by Bloomberg LP, the channel "won’t simply rebroadcast footage from Bloomberg’s existing television operation, but will be made up of live news reporting from the news outlet’s bureaus around the world, as well as a curated and verified mix of video posted on Twitter by the social-media platform’s users."

Axios reports that Twitter is keen to capitalize on what it's already seen in terms of an uptick in ad revenue from live video, and this will be a boon for Bloomberg as well, broadening its content beyond the financial news that is the primary focus of its existing TV network. This is also what's known as a "second-screen" opportunity for getting users attention when they are flipping through apps on their phone while watching TV.

The new channel does not yet have a name, and the financial aspects of the deal have not been revealed.

This will be the first time Twitter has launched a continuous video feed on its platform. And, per the Journal, the company "broadcast 800 hours of programming in the first quarter of 2017, up from 600 hours in the fourth quarter last year." Twitter previously partnered with Bloomberg to broadcast the presidential debates.

Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief financial and operating officer, suggests to the Journal that this is just the first of what could be many such partnerships. "We really think we can reach audiences that are not paying for TV and are watching television on the go and we think Bloomberg is the perfect partner for us to start with," Noto says.

The channel is expected to launch in the fall.

Previously: UGH: The Average Person Is Going To Spend Five Years Of Their Life On Social Media

"In high school US history, I learned that a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy," says Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. "As a news consumer, like most folks, I want news we can trust. That means standing up for trustworthy news media and learning how to spot clickbait and deceptive news." Newmark, along with Facebook, Mozilla, and a consortium of tech leaders, are today announcing a $14 million fund to back a non-profit initiative whose mission it will be to combat the proliferation of fake news and increase trust in journalism worldwide. As the Associated Press reports, it will be called the News Integrity Initiative, and it comes at a time when public perception of the news media is at an all time low.

The non-profit will be based at the City University of New York and run as an independent project of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Facebook's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in a statement, "The initiative will address the problems of misinformation, disinformation and the opportunities the internet provides to inform the public conversation in new ways."

"As digital media allows folks to engage with and distribute news across their social networks, the ability to vet the authenticity and integrity of online content is increasingly important," writes Newmark. "Through research and education, the News Integrity Initiative's goal is to give people the fundamental tools to make decisions about which sources to trust and to question."

Facebook recently took one step forward in the process on its own platform, rolling out a "Disputed" tag for stories that are shared that have been debunked by one of their fact-checking partners, which include Snopes.com and Politifact. Still, this effort falls short of calling out or removing stories that are patently false — a deferential move apparently to avoid angering conservatives who already suspected the site's news feed of having a liberal bias during the election season last year.

As CNet reports, the 19 initial partners in the non-profit will be as follows:

• Arizona State University, in the US
• Center for Community and Ethnic Media at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, in the US
• Constructive Institute at Aarhus University, in Denmark
• Edelman, based in the US
• European Journalism Centre, in the Netherlands
• Fundación Gabriel García Márquez para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), based in Colombia
• Hamburg Media School, in Germany
• Hans-Bredow-Institut, in Germany
• The Ida B. Wells Society, in the US
• International Center for Journalists, based in the US
• News Literacy Project, based in the US
• Polis, London School of Economics, in the UK
• Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po (Sciences Po Journalism School), in France
• Society of Publishers in Asia, based in Hong Kong
• Trust Project, based in the US
• Walkley Foundation, in Australia
• Weber Shandwick, based in the US
• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Division for Freedom of Expression and Media Development, headquartered in France

Previously: Facebook Rolls Out 'Disputed' Tag For Fake News Stories, Rather Than Calling Them Fake

.@Oaklandish, opened by woman of color 2 celebrate pride of America's most progressive city. Lift her up, don't tear down. #oaklandprotest pic.twitter.com/Ci9tU7vHSq

— Libby Schaaf (@LibbySchaaf) November 10, 2016

Kyle Ludowitz, a photojournalist living in Oakland who is a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Masters Candidate, was reportedly attacked while documenting protests against Donald Trump in Oakland Wednesday night by four masked protesters. He described them as anarchists, and they were responding violently to his documenting them as they vandalized and looted a business.

"Particularly with the election of Donald Trump, there’s a very strong sentiment against the media,” he told the Chronicle. “I was expecting more violence from the police, so this caught me off guard.”

Most journalists have perceived the threat to their field and their persons as coming from the Trump campaign and Trump supporters, but the chaos legitimized and inspired by his election is clearly a danger to all. Ludowitz, who has covered conflicts in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine according to his website, was taken aback by what he saw at home. "I was mostly being punched in the face until I fell to the ground. I tried to protect my gear and they started kicking," he told Dailymail.com.

Ludowitz is 27 years old. Both of his cameras were destroyed in the attack, setting him back $5,000.The Committee to Protect Journalists writes that he was treated for a broken cheekbone.

"The media should never be targeted for doing the important work of documenting events of significant public interest," says Carlos Lauría, senior coordinator of the Americas program at CPJ. "Journalists have faced increasing threats and violence at political events throughout the U.S. presidential election campaign. The trend toward heightened violence targeting the press is alarming, and must be reversed."

Previously: Thousands Protest Trump In Oakland For Third Night As Vandalism Harshly Criticized

A note published today written by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the prominent technology website The Verge, disclosed that Deputy Editor Chris Zeigler, a founding member of The Verge, had secretly been working for Apple, Inc. — a company that The Verge covers closely — while maintaining his role as a journalist for the past two months.

"Chris began working for Apple in July, but didn't tell anyone at The Verge that he'd taken a new job until we discovered and verified his dual-employment in early September," Patel revealed. "Chris continued actively working at The Verge in July, but was not in contact with us through most of August and into September. During that period, in the dark and concerned for Chris, we made every effort to contact him and to offer him help if needed. We ultimately terminated his employment at The Verge and Vox Media the same day we verified that he was employed at Apple."

"Obviously having an Apple employee on The Verge staff is a conflict of interest," Patel, unafraid to state the obvious, wrote in his note.

Vox Media Editorial Director Lockhart Steele stepped in to conduct an independent review of The Verge's work and staff interactions with Chris during the time he worked at Apple and Vox Media to determine if that conflict had manifested itself in any of our coverage or affected any of our editorial decisions.

That review wrapped up this week. After interviews with more than a dozen Verge and Vox Media employees who worked closely with Chris, and a careful review of emails, Slack logs, and various login histories, Lockhart determined that Chris' conflict of interest did not have any impact on editorial decisions or journalism produced at The Verge or elsewhere in Vox Media. Chris did not attempt to steer any coverage towards or away from Apple, and any particular decisions he helped make had the same outcomes they would have had absent his involvement.

A surprising result, to say the least. And, in that vein, "Shocked, shocked I say" might be the knowing reaction of jaded industry observers. After all, technology news coverage has been consistently criticized for its culture of "access journalism," whereby powerful companies carefully grant stories to thankful media entities who typically respond with favorable coverage and kid-glove critique; lather, rinse, repeat. Perks like early access to gizmos and straight-up gifts come standard, a Neiman Foundation report stated in August. Of course, as technology increasingly comes to control markets, personal information, and even the flow of media itself, the role of independent journalism seems sort of important. I would say more, but I have to go hop on the Google bus — what, did you think anyone could live in San Francisco these days without working two jobs?

Related: The Troubled Tale Of Lending Club And The Problems Created By Glowing Tech Press

Thank you for clicking on this meaningful headline and welcome to an article with useful information. There were other options, I would presume, like "you won't believe what this one social network is doing to clickbait headlines," but I was banking on those getting pushed to the bottom of your feed. Here's why.

Facebook — that virtual reality world in which your opinions are worth sharing, your political debates are productive, and your exes still let you look at them — is once again cracking down on the tired headline format known as "clickbait," a technique that encourages users to click mindlessly on links in order discover useless information and be served ads.

Facebook first made a similar change its all-important timeline algorithm back in 2014, but apparently more tweaks were necessary. "We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles," Facebook researchers wrote on behalf of the network today. "These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer. For example: “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; or “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.” (All of these links go to SFist.com, you're welcome)

Media organizations live and die by their cooperation with Facebook, a very good company run by very nice people like Mark Zuckerberg who is handsome and admirable. For example, remember Upworthy? You probably haven't seen them on your timeline recently: As Neiman Lab explains in some detail, they've had to pivot entirely since their original business model was built on a previous version of Facebook's algorithm that basically exploited a loophole that favored the clickbait format.

More recently, Facebook's "Trending Topics" was the subject of heated debate this spring, with conservative news outlets crying foul after a Gizmodo article alleged that some (very miserable) curators made arbitrary decisions on which news stories to promote, or in the case of conservative news stories, supposedly suppress. Facebook later found no evidence of bias in the selection of its trending topics, according to an internal probe, but not after a fun-sounding meeting in May with irate conservative thought leaders. And last year, Facebook introduced an option for news outlets to instantly publish articles to Facebook, another great idea that we really like.

Thanks again, Facebook. Now, back to my timeline, which is full of useful items like this video my roommate posted moments ago:

Related: In New Deal, The New York Times Will Publish Some Articles Directly To Facebook

Gizmodo's been blowing the door open on Facebook's increasingly influential Trending news area, in which topics popular at any given moment on the network are shown, typically the top three of them anyway, in a right-hand column next to your personal News Feed. Users have fairly assumed that this area is governed solely by algorithm, and that Facebook is looking beyond your likes and interests and those of your friends to show larger, globally trending news stories in any given hour. But no! According to some anonymous former employees, all contract-based "news curators" who have journalism backgrounds, they controlled what topics and stories showed up as Trending, and as Gizmodo reports in a follow-up today, they were instructed not only to artificially inject certain kinds of stories that weren't necessarily trending, they were told to suppress stories that were about Facebook, the company, and also to suppress topics or news about people popular with conservative users like Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck, or the story about former IRS official Lois Lerner whom Republicans accused of overly scrutinizing conservative groups.

According to one former news curator at Facebook, it often had to do with whoever was on shift at the time, monitoring the trending topics and either choosing to ignore/blacklist them, or highlighting trends that were more aligned with their point of view. Given how many Americans regularly use Facebook — some 167 million — this person said, "I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news."

Facebook said in a statement to CNet that they're taking the allegations "very seriously," and that the company has "rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality."

Also, allegedly, per Gizmodo, "Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories."

The "injection" of some stories that weren't naturally trending seemed to be something that was at the discretion of news curation managers, who wanted to make sure that big stories being covered by multiple major news sources like the New York Times, CNN, and others appeared in the Trending section — and this makes sense if Facebook wants to maintain its relevance in the realm of disseminating news faster than its readers can necessarily catch it.

But, as Gizmodo points out, "In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation." It is not purely based on popularity, as the company has regularly claimed.

We may have to take some of this with a grain of salt however, given that Gizmodo's sources sound like somewhat unhappy former contractors who, as part of a new department at the company and based in the New York office, don't sound like they were treated especially well, and thus don't work there anymore. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of their non-disclosure agreements.

It's telling and potentially troubling, though, given how dearly CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to want to move into the news business, saying that he wants the site's relatively new "Instant Articles" service — in which news organizations and publishers directly publish news to Facebook — saying that he hopes it will become the "primary news experience people have." The company has already partnered, in its beta phase, with the New York Times, NBC, and BuzzFeed for this instant content, in addition to weekly Facebook Live videos that you may have noticed.

But if Facebook means to be everyone's primary news source, don't they need to cater equally to the half of the country that thinks the New York Times is a pinko lefty rag hell bent on destroying America? And what happens when Facebook hires only Ivy educated, predominately white people to curate the news for everyone? Because that seems to be what they've already done.

Update: Facebook employee Tom Stocky, who is in charge of the Trending Topics section of the site, issued the following statement late Monday, which says in part:

We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.

Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.
...
There have been other anonymous allegations -- for instance that we artificially forced ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ to trend. We looked into that charge and found that it is untrue. We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo and others are reporting that the GOP-led Senate Commerce Committee wrote a letter to Zuckerberg shortly after the allegations surfaced, asking that committee staff be briefed on the Trending Topics debacle. See the letter in full here.

Related: In New Deal, The New York Times Will Publish Some Articles Directly To Facebook

A cohort of around 12 San Francisco journalists, most of them known for reporting on tech, have received a mysterious book of tech satire full of "tweets" reimagined in elaborate, handwriting-like typeset. The book's title is Iterating Grace: Heartfelt Wisdom and Disruptive Truths from Silicon Valley's Top Venture Capitalists.

Tech reporter Alexis Madrigal of Fusion, having received something far more interesting in the mail than a new smart watch, has taken to the mystery like something of an amateur detective while acknowledging that some suspect the book to be a clever PR scam. There are also hints that the work could be somehow bound up with the literary types at McSweeney's or The Writer's Grotto, a theory I'm more inclined to believe.

Madrigal has collected the elite list of names who've received the surreptitiously hand-delivered book. They are these:

Alexis Madrigal
Sarah Rich, author
Nellie Bowles, tech journalist, former Re/code writer
Allison Arieff, SPUR editor
Doree Shafrir, Buzzfeed editor
Mat Honan, Buzzfeed editor
Mike Monteiro, designer
Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones editor
James Nestor, author
Jon Steinberg, San Francisco Magazine editor
Casey Newton, The Verge editor

The author of Iterating Grace, Koons Crooks, is described in the foreword. Of course it's a pseudonym, but the question of whose pseudonym is what's keeping Madrigal up at night. That forword, written completely anonymously, describes Koons like this:

Koons Crooks was an inexhaustible foot soldier of the first dot-com boom, working steadily as a programmer at a string of forgotten startups in the late nineties: Naka, InfoSmudge, BITKIT, Popcairn. He was tall and muscular, with a square jaw, olive complexion and thick, wavy hair just long enough to tie back in a ponytail—and yet, several friends told me, he still always managed to look distressingly unhealthy. He was, as on acquaintance put it, “fully post-meal,” inserting pieces of food into his mouth at regular intervals while he worked. A worker remembered Crooks moving through an entire bag of frozen shrimp gyoza in a single morning, raising and lowering his left hand hypnotically, and gumming each dumpling until it softened enough to be chewed and digested. Occasionally, he could be heard saying, very quietly, a single word: “Yum.”

The rest of the book consists of hand-drawn — or more likely letter-pressed — reproductions of odd, epigrammatic tweets mostly from venture capitalists.

It's all very weird, and right now a fully paranoid Madrigal is headed down one particular rabbit hole: "There is a code embedded in names of the people who received the book," he writes. "Remember: there are supposedly 140 books out there. So, perhaps, if you put our first initials (or last initials?) together, it would form the tweet that cracks the case?"

It's also possible, perhaps likely, that Madrigal knows exactly who wrote the book and is letting the readers of his articles in on the fun of discovering for themselves. He's vowed that "if anyone can correctly identify the author of the book, I promise to send you a beautifully framed reproduction of one of the hand-drawn tweets from the book."

What an exciting little adventure Koons Crooks is has taken us on. Anecdotally, I remember one early lesson in my own book sleuthing about authors and their pseudonyms. Reading the books of "Lemony Snicket" called A Series of Unfortunate Events aloud to my younger sister, I began to appreciate the real mystery that a relatively regular guy — in that case local writer Daniel Handler — was able to cultivate with his writerly persona, which he implicated right into the text. Speaking of which, has anyone suspected Handler yet? Fingers continue to fly, including these.

When the San Francisco Bay Guardian announced its closure after 48 years this October, much was unclear besides the suddenness of it all, and the tragedy of this loss to local media.

The news came just as the Guardian's popular Best of the Bay issue, its 40th, hit newsstands. That arrived without mention of the end of the publication or a proper farewell. It wasn't even known whether the weekly paper would be able to maintain its digital archives.

Now, thanks to crowd-sourced donations we'll have some closure from the beloved paper. The modest $25,000 (by San Franciscan standards) goal has been successfully raised.

According to the campaign, the money will allow former staffers to "Create a final commemorative edition that celebrates our history, explores what's happening to San Francisco and how that led to the Guardian's closure, and says goodbye to our loyal supporters and readers." It will also "Preserve and enhance public access to our print and online archives," and "Explore the possibilities of reopening the Guardian under new ownership and support other independent, progressive media outlets in the Bay Area."

Though the successful fundraiser is called "Save the Bay Guardian," it won't "save" the publication we knew... just give it a bit of the dignity and legacy it deserves. Nonetheless, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a former SFBG staffer now of the SF Examiner, is heartened. "Let's keep in mind that progressives, more often than not, don't have a lot of money," he told SFist. The Guardian reaching its goal shows just how much the city of San Francisco cares for its progressive voices. The SF Bay Guardian was and is a special newspaper, unafraid to take on the rich and powerful. More than ever, that's what San Francisco needs."

This ABC reporter casually covers Friday's Batkid melee from the ground.

Sean Parker brims thoughts and emotions, all of which he poured into an 9,000+ word article published today on TechCrunch. The article, "Weddings Used to Be Sacred and Other Lessons About Online Journalism", is an interesting read: in it Parker gives a detailed explanation of his recent Big Sur wedding that incurred an online backlash, discusses the tawdry state of online journalism, and throws in some Tolkeinesque references, ecology lessons and a final, self-aware indictment of the very Internet culture he helped build. "Be careful what you wish for," he concludes, rather spookily, "you just might get it."

Parker's article comes nearly a month after his June 1 wedding, which took place at a Big Sur campground and had a "high fantasy" theme (Parker's words). An article by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic raised questions about the wedding's impact on the site and revealed the fact that Parker paid $1 million in fines to the California Coastal Commission. A variety of online publications picked up the story (including this one), and an Internet backlash was born.

Parker's self-defense details everything from he and his wife's nerdy wedding fantasies to the dereliction of the campground's owners to the sorry state of journalism today. A brief summary, in quotes:

Before the fall:

We lay on the flower-strewn pathway, looking up at the redwood canopy above. The fog rolling in from the ocean enveloped us, imbuing the moment with a feeling of supernatural bliss.

Enter the douche canoe:

Our marriage announcement and wedding photo on Facebook elicited hundreds of these messages from angry bystanders telling us to “fuck off,” and calling us “selfish,” “contemptible,” “disgusting,” and “hypocrites.” Descriptions of me included the words “douchebag” and “prick,” of my wife, the words “gold-digger” and “whore.” Luckily amongst the rabble were some unusually creative hate-mongers who managed to keep our attention by dispensing inventive insults like “douchemonster,” “jackassery,” “jackwagon” and, my personal favorite, “douche canoe.” (I have no idea what a “douche canoe” or a “jackwagon” is, but I’m assuming they are neither forms of transportation nor compliments.)

Wrongfully accused?

Many press reports have focused on the notion that we had somehow harmed the environment. This is simply not true. No redwood trees were harmed in any way. No endangered species were harmed, and, in fact, none were resident on the property. Fabric liners were used to protect the ground from our landscaping work. We were careful not to plant directly in the ground - we brought in potted plants instead.

The media:

While not every publication operates this way ... the fact that so many did engage in the misinformed attacks, even credible outlets like The Atlantic, stands as a stunning testament to the state of online journalism. How could nearly every single reporter have failed to conduct any interviews with anyone at all, let alone ask the very subject of their stories for comment? We would have gladly responded and perhaps much of this anguish could have been avoided.

Isn't it ironic?

Economically speaking, I profited handsomely from the destruction of the media as we knew it. The rest of the world did not make out so well, and society certainly got the worse end of the bargain.

I can’t escape the feeling that there is a kind of cosmic irony at work here ... as if by some process of karmic retribution, the mediums I dedicated my life to building have all too often become the very weapon by which my own character and reputation has been mercilessly attacked in public.

All previous Parker faerie wedding coverage.

[Techcrunch]

We pointed you to this piece from the Columbia Journalism Review in a link dump the other day, but in case you missed it, it's worth a read. Former SF Weekly editor John Mecklin, who's now based in Santa Barbara and writes for the CJR's politics and policy desk, calls out the San Francisco Chronicle for the highly questionable ethics of employing former mayor Willie Brown as a weekly columnist. The detailed piece echoes many of the criticisms levied by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens in that piece from last summer, published in Washington Monthly, and this 2011 piece by the Bay Citizen. So, how long will it be before the Chronicle pays attention to the fact that their integrity is being questioned on a national level?

Mecklin points to the obvious overlaps that occur between Brown's gossipy column, "Willie's World," and the purportedly hard-hitting City Hall-watching done by Matier & Ross. In one recent example, Brown bragged of his trip to China with Ed Lee, Rose Pak, and Kofi Bonner, an executive with Lennar development (whom Willie may or may not have a consulting contract with), with the hope of bringing Chinese investment to Treasure Island and Hunter's Point. Four days later, when the Chinese deal collapsed, Matier & Ross reported on the information from an anonymous source "outside City Hall," spinning it in a way Willie would probably have encouraged by saying that the Chinese were only going to hold up the progress of the project.

Of course, none of these criticisms are new, but it's interesting that they're coming from sources far afield from the left-entrenched SF Bay Guardian, where editor Tim Redmond first called out Brown's conflict of interest, vis a vis representing PG&E, back in 2010.

The ethical issues with Da Mayor's association with the paper are pretty clear, given that SFGate is an extremely well-trafficked website (we don't have any data regarding the newly paywalled SF Chronicle site), and readers likely would not understand the difference between Brown and any other journalist or columnist writing there. Brown is able to use his column both to benefit possible clients — he invokes privacy and attorney-client privilege in not revealing who, exactly, he's working for as consultant, lobbyist, or whathaveyou — and air grievances and wield power over the mayor he created, Ed Lee. As Stevens wrote last year:

The Chron once covered Brown’s dealings aggressively, but it is now so weak that Hearst Corp. nearly folded it a few years ago. Brown often uses his column to promote friends and punish enemies, and his column is not subject to the paper’s ethics policy.

That's right: Officially, the word from the Chronicle is that Brown is just a "celebrity columnist." Editor Ward Bushee said to the Bay Citizen in 2011, "He is a newsmaker who is politically active, of which our readers are quite aware. While he’s not bound by the [newspaper’s] ethics policy, Willie has shown his respect for his readers and the rules of conflict of interest."

We're not so sure about that. Subway, anyone?

[Columbia Journalism Review]

Previously: Regarding Willie Brown and How He Will Never Stop Being Mayor