Inside the Newsroom

In our ongoing effort to make our website more interactive and engaging, we rolled out a few subtle changes this past weekend.  Some of the refinements are totally under the hood. You won't really see them. We added a spell checker to our writing and editing tool for creating blog posts, for instance. We all pride ourselves in knowing how to use the English language, but it can't hurt to have a spell checker given that our editing staff is fairly small...

In 2004 the state passed the Nursing Home Quality Care Act to help nursing homes increase worker wages and staffing levels. As Christina Jewett began to report we discovered that some nursing homes were not spending the money as the bill had intended. To fully explain the story we would need to review the bill, how homes were funded, how they are funded now and how homes were (or were not) spending the money. We decided to use several multimedia elements to help untangle complex concepts, highlight important pieces of the puzzle and to allow users to go beyond our reporting. 

OC Register Scott Brown

Graphics

Working with Orange County Register artist Scott Brown we created simple graphs to illustrate basic concepts. Actually seeing the slow rise of staffing levels against the much larger growth of income is much more effective than stating that direct care staffing only saw a five percent increase while net income had a 127 percent increase. The Register also created a flow chart to explain the six-part funding process.

Video...

At California Watch, it is our goal to include multimedia content with every story to better illustrate the issues and sometimes complex processes outlined in our print pieces.

Our recent report on seismic safety, which examined buildings deemed seismically hazardous in the UC and CSU systems, presented a special challenge. The damage that an earthquake could potentially cause in most cases couldn't be seen by the naked eye, which made it hard to illustrate visually. Instead, we asked ourselves "What would the reader want to see?" From that idea, we decided to create a series of interactive maps that showed exactly where each of the potentially hazardous buildings was located and contained information pertinent to each building.

Then came the hard part: identifying the physical location of each building. I started back in September 2009 to plot the latitude and longitude coordinates for each building using a spreadsheet of hazardous buildings provided by reporter Erica Perez. The location of each building was determined using a combination of campus maps and a free online mapping tool called Map Builder. The coordinates for each building were entered manually into an Excel spreadsheet and combined with Erica's tentative collection of information for each building.

I’ve barely made a dent in the immense stack of resumes that have flooded our offices in the past two weeks. Last month we posted two new jobs to fill – one investigative reporter focusing on the environment and another investigative reporter covering public safety. Once hired, these two reporters will join what is already the largest investigative team operating in the state.

And we’re about to get even bigger.

Today, we are posting two more new jobs, including another reporting position and the brand new role of public engagement manager. Needless to say, we are extremely pleased that California Watch is in a position to grow and build off our early successes. When we’re done with this little hiring spree, our team will have grown to 17 – including 10 reporters and two multimedia producers.

The most important part about this expansion is that it will allow us to greatly enhance our coverage of critical issues facing a state in crisis.

The job descriptions are right here. The application deadline for our other jobs has passed, but you can see our complete list of job openings on our Employment page...