The Voice of San Diego office has the trappings of many newsrooms -- messy desks, glowing computers, journalists hunched over phones. But something about the mood seems a little off.
Where's the anxiety? Why isn't anyone trolling those websites that obsess about the latest layoffs in the news business? Where are the sidelong glances when someone gets stuck too long in the editor's office?
All of that was missing when I visited the Voice of San Diego ( www.voiceofsandiego.org), which in just four years has unearthed a nice batch of political scandals, shown how investigative journalism can be done on the relative cheap and, yes, put a bounce in the step of one corner of the Fourth Estate.
With several big-city dailies facing closure and the cover of Time last week pondering the fate of the American newspaper, I listened to young Voice of San Diego journalists talk about their work with words like "exhilarating," "fulfilling" and "fun." My tiny, ink-sotted heart soared.
The lessons out of the sunny offices on Point Loma appear to be these: A local news site can flourish on charitable donations. It helps to have one big benefactor to get things started. It makes more sense to cover a few topics well, rather than a lot poorly.
Voice of San Diego's nonprofit model won't be the answer for the future of American journalism, but it's probably one of them.
It all got started back in 2004 with local businessman Buzz Woolley's frustration that not enough was being written about San Diego's sometimes clownish city government, which, among other things, almost bankrupted the city by mucking up the pension system.
Woolley, who made his money in real estate and technology, got to talking about alternatives with Neil Morgan, a columnist and former editor with the city's dominant paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune.
"We just needed more quality investigative journalism," Woolley said. "When there are more views, it's good for the public."
Woolley gave $355,000 in start-up money and something else as important -- a license to his news employees to do as they saw fit.
"I really think a story could go after his best friend and Buzz would be fine with it, if the facts were there," said Barbara Bry, a former newspaperwoman and entrepreneur who helped start the site.
Bry helped hire two journalists who'd worked for the business-oriented Daily Transcript in San Diego, Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue; they now run Voice as chief executive and editor, respectively.
