Why everyone should mourn Pacific News Service’s demise
My introduction to Pacific News Service came in 1996, when I was an angry teenager housed at San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall. Officially, PNS was a nonprofit news service based in San Francisco, but it had many projects, including the Beat Within, which facilitated weekly creative writing workshops with the kids in the hall. It printed our work in a newsletter, a rare bright spot in our lives.
One week, Sandy Close, the brilliant and brash executive editor of PNS, came in lieu of the regular facilitators. After the workshop, Close grabbed me by the arm as I was shuffling out and asked me, “What’s it like being the only white kid in here?” I shrugged. She smiled and leaned in. “Write about that.”
It was my first assignment in a now 20-year career in journalism that has taken me from the juvenile justice system to the Ivy League, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a short bout on an MTV reality show. And none of it would have been possible without Pacific News Service and Close. For more than 45 years, PNS fostered journalists, gathered news reports and sold articles to a subscriber network composed of newspapers, magazines and other outlets across the country and beyond. This month, the nonprofit’s board of directors announced that the media organization, along with its subsidiary New America Media, would cease operations on Nov. 30.
Founded in 1970 to get accurate news on the war in Vietnam, the organization went on to pioneer youth media and citizen journalism, build a coalition of ethnic media outlets, commission the country’s first major multilingual polls, and win an Academy Award. There is much to mourn here. PNS, at its core, had a commitment to local, socially conscious reporting and the needs and experiences of people on the margins of society. The unofficial mission statement of the organization was that the people affected by the story should write the story. This idea was implemented at PNS decades before anybody uttered the phrase “citizen journalist” or could imagine what a blog might be.
Its demise is part of a national trend that is the result of profit-driven media dominance and click-bait headline writing. (Close used to sneeringly call this Hollywood journalism: “Write the headline first, then report.”) Many have noted that the announcement came just days after DNAinfo and SFist were shut down in response to an attempt to unionize.
The great accomplishment of PNS was that it was a home for journalists who would never have been brought into any other media organization. You can talk about diverse newsrooms all you want, but I sat in on editorial meetings attended by a man with diamond teeth and a Che Guevara tattoo on his neck who spent 20 years in Pelican Bay State Prison, a Vietnamese refugee, a pregnant teenager, a homeless heroin addict and her dog, a former Black Panther and a Filipina nun. This is not an exaggeration.
It’s impossible to talk about the organization without talking about Close. PNS, in many ways, was a cult of personality, and our work was heavily informed by the whimsy and intellect of our leader, a woman who sped through the office barefoot with a lovebird named Dutch perched on her shoulder. In the same breath, she could remind us of the Maoist roots of the Black Panther movement while insisting that Russell Crowe wasn’t half the man that Charlton Heston was, clicking her false tooth out of place and winking for emphasis.
I showed up at PNS’ door, said I needed a job, and got one. I started by typing and editing the handwritten pieces from contributors in juvenile hall. Within a week, I was working on a reported piece about juvenile justice reform that went out on the wire. My editors at Youth Outlook, PNS’ monthly youth magazine, quickly encouraged me to expand beyond criminal justice. I went on to write about school shootings, illegal street racing and deportations under the Patriot Act. I covered three presidential elections.
Although we explored progressive themes, Close and others would rightly bristle at the suggestion that PNS was a “liberal media organization.” A refugee of the East Coast Establishment, she saved her harshest criticism for the media elite echo chamber and sheltered liberals. We were contrarians, eccentrics and outcasts. We were encouraged to upend conventional narratives and, as a result, our newsroom was chaotic and contentious. While MSNBC and the New York Times were falling at President Barack Obama’s feet, PNS was running pieces critical of his immigration policy.
PNS will no longer have a home in San Francisco in part because the changes the city has experienced in the past 10 years have pushed it out. There is no room in San Francisco for a nonprofit media organization that puts foster youth on its payroll and prioritizes the stories of people on society’s margins.
When we moved to our office on Ninth Street, our neighbors were gay leather bars and cannabis dispensaries. As it prepares to close its doors, PNS is in the literal shadow of Twitter’s headquarters. The irony there, of course, is that an organization committed to contrarian thought and chaotic discourse is being eclipsed by an industry founded on the premise that you can create your own global echo chamber and carry it around in your pants.