Spring Training for Journalists draws a crowd

Fainaru tosses first pitch at City College event

(Story by Sara Steffens and Rebecca Rosen Lum, Photos by Russ Cain)

About 120 participants gathered Saturday at City College of San Francisco for the first “Spring Training for Journalists,” a daylong workshop we hope will become an annual tradition for news staffers, freelancers and students throughout our region.

This year’s offering, “Reinventing Your Career,” covered the job and technology skills demanded by a fast-changing news profession. Top-flight instructors ran seminars on topics such as entry-level multimedia, audio production basics and working with interpreters to report on underserved communities.

Steve Fainaru (photo), who won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on military contractors in Iraq, kicked it off Saturday morning by explaining why he gave up his gig at the Washington Post to take on a radically different assignment: managing editor in charge of news at the Bay Citizen, the nonprofit startup the Guild helped to create in the interest of quality journalism.

Investigative reporter Steve Fainaru (top) and photojournalist Kim Komenich, both Pulitzer winners, share their knowledge.

A partnership of philanthropist Warren Hellman and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Bay Citizen is set to launch May 26 with a new website and twice-weekly Bay Area content in The New York Times. Fainaru said he wanted to foster local journalism marked by as much ambition and skill as daily newspapers at their best. And he explained how freelancers will be a critical part of the new operation, supplementing a core staff of about 15 journalists to start.

One of the most crowded among six break-out sessions, “Driving Web Traffic,” led by Wired.com Science Editor Betsy Mason and Knight Digital Media Center Webmaster Scot Hacker, outlined how social networking and HTML coding can be used to help build an online audience.

Click here for the full story.