Santa Cruz Local is a news startup producing audio shows and online magazine pieces about public policy in Santa Cruz County. Local legacy media companies, hamstrung by a changing print industry, are not meeting the public’s needs. Our company will be part of the new model for local news media that’s quickly growing across the country: independent online publications.
We established our company in February as an LLC and are planning an official launch this summer. Though we are a private company, we rely on grants, memberships and donations.
MISSION: We produce fair and accurate local journalism that holds power to account.
VISION: When we are all watching and engaged in our local government, our needs are addressed, democracy works better and our community is stronger.
VALUES: We value integrity, transparency, public trust, and quality over quantity. We aim for truth, depth, context and analysis, not virality, online engagement and speed.
Our founding principles
- Journalism comes before profit. We believe journalism is a public good. Our mission of creating fair and accurate local journalism that holds power to account drives all business decisions. Our company exists to benefit the public, not to maximize profit.
- Our stories will inform you of what matters. Our reporting should help you make better-informed decisions about your lives, your public institutions and your vote. We want our reporting to help you watch and engage with our local governments and institutions.
- We seek the truth, no matter who it comforts or afflicts. No donor, investor or advertiser of Santa Cruz Local will have any influence on or early access to any journalism we produce.
- We value our employees and respect their time. We will pay a fair and competitive salary. We love our work, but balance comes first. Full-time employees will work 40 hours a week, no more. Also, we pay equal wages for equal work across gender, race, sexual orientation and age.
- We will be transparent. Even though we’re a private company, we will publish the same kind of financial information that a nonprofit would. We want to show you what we’re doing with your donations. Also, like the public institutions we cover, we will publish our salaries. We also will publish a list of our donors. If a story involves a donor or investor, we will disclose that. All our writers will have a bio that includes an ethics statement.
- Accuracy, thoroughness and fairness come before speed and style. Our stories give context and explanations. We want to foster informed, healthy discourse. We’re not after your clicks. We’ve designed our company so that the community, not website traffic, drives revenue. The top sources of our revenue will be major donors, grants, memberships and crowdfunding.
- Locals come first. We want to support locals, since locals support us. We will work with Santa Cruz County vendors as much as possible.
- We will look for solutions. We will look for successful models in other similar cities and compare them point by point with what Santa Cruz is doing.
- The more media literate our community is, the stronger our democracy. We want to show our community the value of fair and rigorously fact-checked journalism, and how that’s different from bloggers and entertainment. We want to show our community how to identify misinformation.
Who we are
Kara Meyberg Guzman / Co-founder
kara@santacruzlocal.org
From 2017-18, Kara Meyberg Guzman served as the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s managing editor, the first woman and first person of color to hold the newspaper’s top editor position. Prior to that, she covered transportation, government, environment and education as a reporter and oversaw the website as the digital manager. She has a biology degree from Stanford University and lives in Santa Cruz. [Kara’s ethics statement]
Stephen Baxter / Co-founder
stephen@santacruzlocal.org
Stephen Baxter is a veteran newspaper reporter who has won five awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He holds a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, Associated Press, CBS News “48 Hours,” MotherJones.com and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. He lives in Santa Cruz. [Stephen’s ethics statement]