Newsdesk.org was established in 2000 as a source for noncommercial, public-interest journalism. It was one of the earliest experiments in the ongoing effort to establish a viable nonprofit option for independent, trustworthy news reporting.

From 2000–2011, Newsdesk.org reporters and editors produced a vast array of reportage covering topics of local, national and international concern.

The aim of this online archive is to preserve and improve access to their work, through an ongoing process of:

• Fully crediting all the almost two-dozen reporters, editors and photojournalists who contributed to Newsdesk over the years
• Correcting, improving and re-organizing taxonomies (categories and tags) to improve access to coverage
• Repairing broken links where possible
• Identifying third-party, archival links to lost reportage by partner organizations that are now defunct
• Ensuring this aggregate body of pathbreaking news coverage continues to illuminate issues that remain urgent and in motion to this day

You can view all project revisions and updates on the changelog.

Coverage, Partnerships & Recognition

Over the course of more than a decade, Newsdesk.org produced almost 1,300 articles covering a wide range of local, national and international issues. These include the global energy industry, environmental justice, criminal-justice reform, FCC policy, local and national election coverage, and much more.

Newsdesk also published the long-running aggregation service, News You Might Have Missed (aka NYMHM), received a 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, and was a Changemakers finalist for its local.newsdesk.org bureau project.

As part of this work, Newsdesk partnered with news organizations such as The San Francisco Public Press, Oakland Local, KALW-FM, and others.

Financing & Business Structure

During its lifetime, Newsdesk existed as a founding project of Independent Arts & Media (IAM), a fiscal sponsor that, true to its name, was created specifically to provide a legal framework and financial services to media and cultural producers doing noncommercial work in the public interest.

Newsdesk received grants over time from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, and by individual and major donors. The project did not attract long-term financing, and ceased publication in 2011.

Today, IAM — which was founded out of a sense of expediency to provide a roof for Newsdesk and several other civic media and culture enterprises — is a thriving service organization that manages millions of dollars for hundreds of noncommercial media/arts projects around the United States.

The strength, resilience and adaptability of this infrastructure model cannot be overstated, and is a significant, lasting, and instructive outcome of the original Newsdesk experiment.

Link Decay & Taxonomical Sprawl

Over its decade-plus of productivity, Newsdesk.org migrated across multiple website platforms, with successive generations of tech support — from a hand-rolled CMS in its earliest days, to several major iterations of the Movable Type and WordPress platforms. This did not always produce the best information-architecture outcomes. As a result, the almost 1,300 articles posted here are collected in sometimes-overlapping categories and tags that don’t always align to actual article topics.

Newsdesk also published with a number of partners, and participated in programs sponsored by a variety of journalism funders and social-entrepreneurship advocates. Many of these organizations have also undergone website relaunches, or have ceased publication and gone permanently offline.

As such, there are a myriad links to partner organizations that lead to 404 pages or URLs that are no longer extant.

Wherever possible these links, categories and tags will be re-sorted, corrected, deleted, and otherwise untangled. Updates to this process will be tracked in the changelog.

Major Coverage Arcs, 2000-2011

• World Power: Global Energy Politics & Issues, by Jennifer Huang: A sprawling reporting series, exploring the geopolitical, environmental and legal complexities of the global fossil fuel industry. (2002-2004)
• The Toxic Tour: Pollution & Politics in California Communities, by Kwan Booth, CB Smith-Dahl, Kim Komenich, and Jasmin Mara: A wide-ranging reporting project on public-health and environmental-justice issues in West Oakland, Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, Hunters Point in San Francisco, and San Jose. The Toxic Tour won a 2010 SPJ SDX award and was the inaugural project on the Spot.Us, the first journalism crowdfunding platform. (2009-2011)
• Smarter on Crime, by Bernice Yeung: A hard-news blog with a solutions-journalism focus on prisons, parole, public health and other issues of incarceration.
• News You Might Have Missed, by Jen Burke Anderson, Julia Scott, George Shirk, Don Clyde, Natalie Orenstein, Lemery Reyes, Ronnie Lovler, Jennifer Hamm, Emily Wilson. One of the earliest online news aggregators (email newsletter and news blog), rounding up “important but overlooked news from around the world.” (2002-2010)
• The Truthiness Report: 2008 San Francisco Election-Ad Fact Checking, reported in collaboration with The San Francisco Public Press and KALW-FM.
• The World Social Forum 2003, by Lucimara Nunes and Erica Junghans. Exclusive coverage of the third World Social Forum from Porto Allegre, Brazil.