Tweeted today by Bay Citizen Executive Managing Editor Jeanne Carstensen...
Last day of NYT Bay Area pages is 4/29. CIR/NYT announce end of deal as CIR merger with @TheBayCitizen nears completion.
— Jeanne Carstensen (@jcarstensen) April 11, 2012
The Center For Investigative Reporting is a Berkeley-based non-profit journalism organization co-founded in 1977 by Lowell Bergman, and the Bay Citizen is an online-only local news site launched in 2010. (Note: The Center of Investigative Reporting's California Watch project is a KQED news partner.) The two announced a merger at the end of March.
In February, as the two organizations explored joining forces, Steve Myers of Poynter.org, rounded up speculation from other media watchers and explored the possibility that the merger with CIR would spell the end of the Bay Citizen's partnership with the New York Times. That deal has given the Times twice-weekly Bay Area coverage from the Citizen for the Times' print and online publications. Myers cited this post from PBS' MediaShift:
...(C)ritics have suggested that the Times' partnerships offer as many drawbacks as they do benefits.
"We have our identity online that's completely different than what we're doing in the Times," Steve Fainaru, former acting editor in chief of the Bay Citizen, said last November in an interview with NetNewsCheck.com, a website focused on digital media. "We want to be more innovative. We want to be experimental. We want to have a different voice than we have in the Times."
[The] announcement could finally give the Bay Citizen the opportunity to do that. The Bay Citizen's contract with The Times is scheduled to renew in October unless terminated by either party with 60 days' notice, according to the news startup. In a presentation to the Bay Citizen's board in late January, Bronstein notably left out discussion of the organization's contract with the Times, Lewis wrote in a blog post on the Bay Citizen's site. Bronstein said the agreement could possibly conflict with partnerships that CIR has with dozens of other print partners, according to Lewis.