About

Curating the Community

BayPress.org is the headquarters of the “Bay Area Citizen Editorial Board Project,” a trailblazing endeavor to bring new perspectives and community input to the editorial pages of the Bay Area’s newspapers.

The site serves as both the public face of the editorial board project and as a central hub for intelligent, curated Bay Area commentary. BayPress features exclusive opinion pieces from civic leaders and concerned community members, as well as links to the best local opinion and analysis on the web.

The Bay Area Citizen Editorial Board Project

The Bay Area Citizen Editorial Board Project is a groundbreaking effort to reconnect Bay Area newspapers with their local communities. For a minimum period of three years, independent citizens will serve on the editorial boards of 11 major Bay Area newspapers. In this role, the citizen board members contribute insight into their communities and their own unique perspective on critical civic issues. In addition to bringing valuable input to editorial board deliberations, the citizen members are encouraged to write original opinion pieces that provide readers with an alternative point of view.

The project stems from the 2007 settlement of a public interest lawsuit filed against MediaNews Group and the Hearst Corporation by San Francisco businessman and media competition activist Clint Reilly. The suit came six years after Reilly’s landmark anti-trust case against the Hearst Corporation, which sought to maintain competition between San Francisco’s two remaining dailies, the Examiner and the Chronicle.

When MediaNews and Hearst dropped their plans to merge operations and agreed to compete vigorously in the Bay Area, Reilly settled his 2006 suit and joined MediaNews in launching the Bay Area Citizen Editorial Board project.

The project provides for at least one independent citizen to serve on the editorial board of each of MediaNews’ 11 Bay Area daily papers for a minimum of three years. The citizen board members serve one-year terms and are encouraged to participate in discussions and deliberations as full members of the editorial board.