Journalists press on for a slain colleague

Mary Fricker, a longtime business reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, was about a year into retirement when she got word.

Lisa Pickoff-White was driving cross-country to start her journalism studies at UC Berkeley.

And Bob Butler, a member of the National Assn. of Black Journalists' board, was freelancing after nearly three decades of reporting for radio stations.

All later joined the Chauncey Bailey Project -- a collaboration of dozens of journalists from newspapers, broadcast stations, universities and nonprofit groups who came together with a shared determination to not let the black community newspaper editor's slaying stop his work.

At the time of his death, Bailey had been looking into Your Black Muslim Bakery, a politically connected group that once epitomized black economic empowerment in Oakland but has been buffeted by financial problems, infighting and allegations of sexual abuse and violence.

Police believe that Bailey was killed over his coverage of the bakery, and project members have probed deeply into the organization's history.

Recently, the project reported that its inquiries had prompted Santa Barbara police to reopen an investigation into the unsolved 1968 slayings of a couple who belonged to a mosque that was a forerunner of the bakery.

The Bailey Project is believed to be the first broad-based effort in more than 30 years to pursue the work of a journalist killed in this country, according to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists.

"You have to let the community know you can't kill a story by killing a reporter. You're going to bring the press down on you like gangbusters," said Fricker, who has been working on the project four days a week while living in a bedroom above a friend's garage.

Although Bailey received one of U.S. journalism's most prestigious awards after his death, he was working outside the mainstream when he was killed. And the 57-year-old editor of the Oakland Post -- a free weekly with a circulation of 50,000 -- did not fit neatly into the mold of a classic investigative reporter. He had been fired two years earlier from the Oakland Tribune for undisclosed ethical lapses.