Frequently Asked Questions

What is the CVJC?

The Central Valley Journalism Collaborative is a new, nonprofit newsroom and infrastructure that aims to reignite high-quality journalism across California’s San Joaquin Valley. Such journalism will boost public engagement with civic life, improve the quality of life and opportunities in the Valley and provide the sort of trustworthy and important information people need to participate in a healthy democracy.

Where is it based?

The CVJC team is based in Merced, a vibrant and growing community that is a two-hour drive from both the Bay Area and Sacramento, and even closer to the Sierra Nevada mountains and Yosemite National Park. Fueled by expansion of UC Merced, the newest University of California campus, the city is attracting growing numbers of people from other parts of California and beyond, bringing new diversity of cultures, ideas and entrepreneurial models to this agriculture- based community, where housing is still relatively affordable. The state High Speed Rail project will have a stop in Merced, meaning this city will be transformed by fast and convenient access to the Bay Area and other growing parts of the Valley.

Why Merced?

The need for quality journalism here is substantial. Cuts in the region’s legacy newsrooms have made it hard for residents to stay informed about topics that are shaping the future of this increasingly important community. Merced County is home to nearly 290,000 people. Like many communities across the Valley, it is majority Latino (63%); more than a quarter of residents were born outside the United States; and more than half speak a language other than English at home (mainly Spanish but also Hmong, Thai, Punjabi and Hindi). Overall, Merced County residents are more likely to live in poverty than the U.S. as a whole; have a lower median household income ($56,330); and are less likely to have a bachelor’s degree (14% compared to 20.2% nationwide). But with changes already taking place, this is an exciting moment to be part of the city’s transformation.

How is CVJC funded?

The CVJC is primarily funded through the James B. McClatchy Foundation, with additional support from Microsoft, the Irvine Foundation, and local community foundations. This seed funding is designed to not only launch the CVJC newsroom but to provide the support needed to build sustainability for the long term.

What does it do?

The CVJC’s primary focus is to produce high-level journalism, the sort of investigations, analysis and solutions-oriented reporting that legacy newsrooms no longer pursue due to limitations of their business models. As a nonprofit newsroom, the CVJC is a public service, one that builds engagement through outreach and by producing news that informs and improves civic life. It is not clickbait. It is news that holds government representatives accountable, sheds light on issues that matter and is shaped by the needs and interests of the community – particularly by those community members who rarely have a voice in traditional media.

The CVJC also aims to promote civic engagement through events, town hall-styled gatherings, outreach to community organizations, journalism training for community members and support for journalism-learning opportunities for students and educators.

The Merced newsroom will be the first of what CVJC envisions as a model that will expand to other communities throughout the Valley.

Where is CVJC news published?

As a nonprofit, CVJC will produce journalism freely available for republishing. It is building its own newsroom website, which will be shaped by input from its community of readers, listeners and viewers. It also partners with other Valley newsrooms to create collaborative news projects distributed by those partners to reach audiences across media platforms.