By McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama Newspaper Project 
This week McSweeney’s is doing a second print run on the San Francisco Panorama.
This was a Sunday sized broadsheet paper of over 300 pages (I still haven’t finished my copy) complete with a front page investigation on the Oakland Bay Bridge. The Bay Bridge report was completed by our friends at the San Francisco Public press and funded by over 150 small contributors at Spot.Us.
The full investigation into the Bay Bridge can be found here.
With more copies in the door the SF Public Press is making one last offer to try and reach our fundraising goal for this pitch. Currently – the amount of labor put into the story has us operating at a bit of a loss.
If anyone contributes $50 or more towards the Spot.Us pitch they’ll get a copy of the Panorama (priced at $16) and membership to the SF Public Press for the next year. If you’ve donated $20 already – then it’s just another $30 to get a copy of the Panorama and become a Public Press member.
Fundraising will end this weekend and the pitch will be closed. But the reporting - that will live on!
Posted by Spot. Us on 01/11/10Hello Spot.Us community members.
I trust by now you've seen the report produced by The Public Press which was published in McSweeney's Panoroma. If you haven't, all the relevant links are at the end of this post.
The pitch is still active on Spot.Us and will remain so until January for two reasons.
First: McSweeney's is planning to do a second printing run in January and more Panorama's will be made available at that time. We will keep you updated on when and where you can pick them up.
Second: We are still trying to recoup some of the costs of reporting. As you might imagine countless people-hours went into the reporting and writing of this fantastic report on the bay bridge. There were travel costs, labor costs, printing costs and more. We have calcuated the bare minimum and it comes out to just over $600 more than what we have raised to date.
So we are asking for your help to spread the word so we can reach our goal. If you want to make that last end of the year tax-deductable donation, consider contributing to this pitch. If you know others that want to support good reporting like this, please pass along the word. With your support we can come out of this being able to support the reporters who worked tirelessly to produce this reporting.
We hope you have happy holidays.
Their Bay Bridge report can be broken down into the following.
Unparalleled bridge, unprecendented cost
Patricia Decker and Robert Porterfield, McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama/SF Public Press — Dec 8 2009 - 12:50pm
When completed, the new east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be not only the most complex engineering feat in California history, but also the most expensive, with a cost never subjected to public scrutiny. Although today’s price tag stands at $6.3 billion, the figure accounts for only salaries and hard materials—things like concrete and steel and cranes. When all is said and done, the new Bay Bridge will wind up costing tax- and toll-payers more than $12 billion—a figure that leaves even the officials in charge “staggered.”
How Wall Street profits from bridge building
The Bay Area Toll Authority has the unique power to raise bridge tolls without the Legislature's approval, which it has done repeatedly to pay off the $6.9 billion bond debt amassed so far to build the new Bay Bridge and upgrade six other spans. That makes BATA particularly attractive to Wall Street, which has pocketed more than $122 million in fees to arrange the borrowing.
Building the bay's signature span
When all the pieces are finally welded together and tethered by the main suspension cable, the Bay Bridge east span will be not just a new American icon, but also a truly global monument. From the enormous solid steel castings of cable saddles, brackets and bands being forged in Japan and England to the gigantic bearings and hinges being manufactured in South Korea and Pennsylvania, fabrication of the bridge is under way in seven foreign countries and in more than two dozen American cities, including 12 in California.
The fine print: Interest doubles the total price-tag
Overall cost estimates have been presented to the public in annual reports and press briefings, but the cost of interest on money borrowed to pay for construction has not been included.
A cool timeline for the bay bridge
Heralding the Panorama: People who covered the Panorama.
Posted by Spot. Us on 12/22/09Spot.Us and The SF Public Press worked with McSweeny's to bring you the Bay Bridge Report, explaining how costs on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge rose to at least $12 billion.
Much can be said about the piece produced by Bob Portefield, Patricia Decker and The Public Press team and the work they did on the Bay Bridge report.
But for now we will let it stand for itself. Consider that the Public Press is eager to do follow up reporting. So please spread the word - We have produced this great work but with more resources more follow up reporting can happen.
Unparalleled bridge, unprecedented cost
Building the bay's singature spanThe fine print: Interest doubles the total price tag
How Wall Street profits from bridge building
McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama is being sold today! Find a location near you. Or look for newsies selling them on the street. There's a special deal to get the paper today only ($5). I know there is one newsie at the corner of Haight and Divisidaro. (The visual impact of the bay bridge report in print is amazing!).This story is part of a special reporting project that first appeared Dec. 8, 2009 in the San Francisco Panorama, a single-edition broadsheet newspaper published by McSweeney's. The reporting project, conducted by SF Public Press, was researched and written by Patricia Decker and Robert Porterfield with the assistance of Mike Adamick, Andrew Bertolina, Richard Pestorich and Michael Winter. The project was supervised by Public Press director Michael Stoll. More than 140 people helped to fund this reporting project by donating through Spot.Us.
Some more news on the Panorama and the Bay Bridge report.
Why should we care about the Bay Bridge?
The official cost estimate of $6.3 billion includes well-documented and little-known and cost overruns spanning the last 12 years, since the bridge was originally proposed. That money is coming from an array of state and regional taxpayer-supported funds, tolls and borrowing. Bottom line: Bay Area residents have little understanding of how much they've already paid to get this bridge built, and how much they're on the hook for when this complex and aesthetically striking bridge comes online. And the fate of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge somewhat mirrors that of the state of California, since some of the same financing and management processes are at work.
Is this project an investigative report?
There's some internal debate about that among the reporters and editors whether this is an "investigative" or "explanatory" piece of journalism. There's not a clear-cut distinction. What gives it an investigative feel? We've been requesting documents from about half a dozen state, regional and local agencies since September and we've discovered some important -- and previously unreported -- trends in budgeting for the overall construction project. Importantly, you don't have to uncover corruption or incompetence to call it investigative. Our biggest advance is taking the long view of the costs and capital involved in such mind-bogglingly massive construction stretching more than a decade. That's the explanatory bit.
How much information have you examined?
Our reporters have requested and sifted through about 20,000 pages of documents. They've traveled to Sacramento, Oakland and San Francisco to do reporting. They've also interviewed several dozen sources in and outside of government, from a wide variety of points of view.
Who's involved?
In alphabetical order: Andrew Bertolina, Robert Porterfield, Christopher Benz, Dave Eggers, Gena Lindsay, Jesse Nathan, Max Rosenblum, Michael Adamick, Michael Stoll, Michael Winter, Patricia Decker, Richard Pestorich, among others.
How has McSweeney's and SF Public Press worked together?
Well. We've been meeting at the Public Press offices for about two months. On Monday we had a small meeting at McSweeney's to discuss questions on graphics, sidebars, illustrations and photography. The editors from both organizations are exchanging drafts of the story and have sent pointed questions to the reporters. While we're working on the writing, the reporters are still reviewing the numbers, events, quotes. Meanwhile, three graphic designers and McSweeney's publisher Dave Eggers have weighed in with ideas about how to display the reams of data we've got graphically.
What next steps will you take?
After this report is published, there will be plenty of of work to be done to go through contracts, audits, reports, laws and regulations that affect the Bay Bridge. We are planning to publish follow-up stories based on this reporting into 2010.
What new information will you be reporting when the story is published?
You'll have to read the report, coming soon to sfpublicpress.org and the San Francisco Panorama in print.
The reporting takes time from individuals and therefore takes money. We have lots of folks working on the project as volunteers, but we also are paying some reporters to assure that we'd reach the finish line. As of right now we are actually $400 in debt. We hope to raise some of that money and more so that we can continue to make meaningful progress on this topic. Your support is appreciated and we hope more civically engaged folks will join you.
Posted by Spot. Us on 11/25/09[Note from Spot.Us: We don't play often in the breaking news space - we focus on long form reporting, which the bridge obviously deserves, but we did produce a roundup of newsworthy links related to the Bay Bridge. Check out our tasty-hyperlinks]
We at SF Public Press have been stunned by the stream of contributions to this pitch over the past two days. THANK YOU, everyone, for supporting our Bay Bridge investigative reporting team.
When we joined with McSweeney's and Spot.us to investigate cost overruns on Bay Bridge construction and retrofitting, we felt confident that we were dedicating our reporters to a vitally important project. Tuesday's unfortunate accident — in which recently installed bridge components broke and fell onto traffic, leading to full bridge closure — validated that assumption and unexpectedly nudged our investigation into the spotlight.
This recent development has reinforced our determination to pursue this investigation as planned. This new attention affirms what we believed all along: that people in the Bay Area are concerned about this major infrastructure project, both in terms of cost and safety, and want more information about how it will affect their lives financially, politically, physically and civically. We will do our best to bring this complex, costly, drawn out construction project into tight focus by providing relevant history, context and analysis.
Many of the people supporting this investigation learned about it from SFist.com, Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard and BayNewser. Probably many more through Twitter. We very much appreciate spreading the word.
Those posts drew readers, some of whom turned into donors. You can read down the right-hand column to see how many have contributed — well past 70 at my last count with individual donations ranging from $2 to $102. This kind of broad base public support is what makes Spot.us work; it's also what we're trying to cultivate through our Public Press membership program, which will be key to our long-term survival as a nonprofit news organization.
A few people have posted comments about the investigation here and on other sites. Our reporters are reading all of these comments and, when possible, incorporating responses into their reports. If you have any questions pertaining to this project or suggestions for the reporters, please post them here.
Again, thank you for helping us build public media institutions directly supported by grassroots fundraising within the communities they serve.
Thanks for your support!
From Patricia Decker at The Public Press
Because investigative journalism isn't artifice. Or, at least, it shouldn't be. And that's not what I practice. Some people have expressed concerns that our story will be negative, and this missive is my attempt to clear the air:
We never aim to be negative, because it is the responsibility of the journalist to present a fair and unbiased story. And I'm certainly not out to expose wrongdoings. It's my intent to inform Bay Area residents about the many facets of this bridge project and how a likely toll increase isn't about just asking for more money but about how it fits into the larger picture of politics, seismology and ambitious engineering. Before I became a journalist, I had a past life as a structural engineer — I obtained my master's in Structural Engineering from UC Berkeley — and have always been fascinated with the role of bridges in our daily lives.
This story is about contextualizing the cost overruns, which aren't news because they've been reported before. Because this project is so massive, the story has been presented in bits and pieces over the years. The withering of in-depth explanatory journalism in the Bay Area has meant that coverage of the Bay Bridge is on a breaking-news basis — the staffs at the Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News don't have the time or the manpower these days to produce the deeper story. What we're writing is a great explanation of the cost overruns — the overruns aren't news, but the context is.
From the very beginning, we've been working with the staff at the MTC and the Bay Area Toll Authority not just to collect data but to properly interpret it. Many of the documents that we're reviewing require the expertise of the agency staff to translate their importance into layman's terms. That's our number one priority: make this complicated project simple enough so that our readers can parse the information that's available to them (everything we review is publically available, but most people aren't such gluttons for punishment).
Most importantly, we've conducted some preliminary interviews with the officials at BATA, including chief financial officer Brian Mayhew and legislation and public affairs director Randy Rentschler. My colleagues and I speak with staff members nearly every day, and I believe in building relationships and developing trust. I can only write the facts and the more I speak with these experts, the more I'll understand. I can't speak honestly with them if I presume they are doing something wrong and if I assume I'll be writing a negative story. As the journalist, I'm there to ask questions and above all listen to what they are telling me. I've found that the story writes itself when you do the reporting because you're just putting the words of the experts in the paper for everyone else to read.
The kind of journalism that we're aiming for on this project is providing the parties involved — Caltrans, the MTC, BATA, the CTC, etc. — with an opportunity to have more of their words make it to print. Dave Eggers and McSweeney's have been extremely generous with providing space for the story — we can basically make it as long as we need it to be — but I'm sure you know that word count is a luxury in print. Especially these days as print papers grow thinner and thinner. We're looking to continue coverage after this story goes to the presses, and give all sides the representation that they deserve. As it is, there has been plenty of negative coverage on the Bay Bridge from the dailies.
This is a chance to strike a balance and the photography we hope to include is a key component of that, providing a window into the bridge-building process and certainly coloring the story more than this stack of financial documents on my desk.
Images portray the humanity of the project, and breathe life into it. Living in the Bay Area, I can speak to the sentiment here that we're paying all of this money for a project that has yet to deliver what it promises will be a marvel of engineering. Photographs capture the personality of the project — it really is being built, and it's being built by real people. But we don't see any of that here. This story is not just about Caltrans and the bureaucracy; it's also about the pride of a nation (China) and the craftsmanship of piecing together a staggering amount of steel with thousands of miles of welds.
Posted by Spot. Us on 10/26/09An exciting thing about pushing boundaries in journalism is looking back at space you've carved out along the way. If you've followed the Bay Bridge project since its announcement two weeks ago you will notice a slight repositioning, not of the editorial (which will be the subject of our next post) but the representation of monies. Instead of a "matching" grant from McSweeney's we are considering it a commitment of $5,000 towards our goal which will pay for expenses and reporters time.
Part of this switch is in response to a donor question about the level of engagement McSweeney's has in this project. They are fully committed to doing everything possible to make it happen. We hope you are too!
In light of that dedication, the matching part of this grant can be expressed as less of a conditional. There is nothing nefarious in wanting to express this as a matching grant. Our goal was to make contributions from the public a social engagement, a way to be working with McSweeney's, The Public Press and Spot.Us as a team in putting this project on. But to be fully transparent, which we believe is key in a public project, we've decided to show the project's progress by representing McSweeney's contributions which have been committed. The Public Press, McSweeney's and Spot.Us are all in agreement with this transition.
Another part of this decision is to give the project a boost of adrenaline. Look how much we've raised now!
Spot.Us is going to match all donations that have come into the project to date - just to ensure people that have donated so far that indeed their donations had double the impact.
The next update (tomorrow) will be about the editorial direction of the project.
If you or others you know might support this investigation please pass along word of the Bay Bridge Investigation!
Posted by Spot. Us on 10/26/09
