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Editor’s note: Wallace Baine is the city life correspondent at Lookout Santa Cruz. One of the first employees, he was a part of the coverage team that won the 2024 Breaking News Pulitzer Prize.
In the summer of 2020 — neck deep in a worldwide pandemic and surrounded by fires consuming my home state of California — I got a call from Ken Doctor. At the time, I was closing in on 30 years as a writer, columnist and editor covering the uniquely eccentric arts/culture scene in Santa Cruz. I knew Ken only a little bit, from his time on the board of the local museum, but I also considered him an invaluable source on the one topic I couldn’t write about: the fate of my workplace, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, one of many mid-size daily newspapers being consumed by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital like a whale consumes krill.
I had heard murmurs that Ken was starting up some kind of online-only news source in Santa Cruz and had thought fleetingly that I would like to be part of something new, fresh and forward-looking. But I had spent almost three decades avoiding the utility board meetings and weekend phone calls to the police PIO that was the backbone of a good news reporter’s experience. I figured that a writer who had spent most of his time hanging out with musicians, filmmakers and painters was a low priority.
So, when I got the call from Ken, I assumed he was looking for references for other reporters, photographers and/or editors that I had worked with. But he wanted me. I had questions, sure. But, deep down, I knew instantly I would do this.
I was on board then when Lookout Santa Cruz launched in the fall of 2020. Though the world was still surreal after months of lockdown, a vaccine had yet to be developed, and a harrowing presidential election was right in front of us, there was a sense of exuberance in those first staff meetings in the relative “outdoors” safety of Ken and Kathy Doctor’s back deck. Suddenly, that beleaguered sense of doom that had pervaded the newsrooms where I had worked, a sense familiar to just about any newspaper journalist of the last 20 years or so, had lifted.
The paralyzing ambivalence about digital news vs. ink-on-paper was gone. The downsizing, cutback and shrinkage vibes lifted like the morning fog. At Lookout, it was all about upsizing and expansion and possibility. That start-up cocktail can be pretty intoxicating. As a journalist who had grown accustomed to getting bad news from some nebulous corporate chain of command, I slowly rose from my default crouch position.
There was quite a bit of unanticipated staff turnover in the first year or two of the Lookout experience, and in the end, I felt a great sense of empathy for the young journalists from other places across the U.S. who had struggled to build a life in the unforgiving housing market of Santa Cruz and in the isolating strangeness of the pandemic. But eventually, like a rock band that went through big personnel changes before getting the mix of talents and personalities just right, we had our Fleetwood Mac moment. We found the line-up that would lead us to success.
That success was formalized in the spring of 2024 when we learned that we had won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. It was a wonderful capstone for someone like me, whose career in newspaper journalism predates, gulp, the World Wide Web. But it was also a confirmation that Ken Doctor’s instincts were right from the beginning. For years, I had been frustrated by my newspaper’s uncertain and tentative embrace of internet journalism.
But it was not only that Lookout dissipated all that uncertainty for me. It was also something larger and more fundamental to our roles — producers of news and consumers of it — as Americans, something as central to those in Eugene and Springfield as it is to Santa Cruz. One of Ken’s most compelling arguments, in my view, was the crucial role that local news plays in — not to be too grandiose, but — democracy.
With so many small (and not so small) newspapers essentially stripped down and sold for parts across the country, local news consumers are left with a vacuum of information of what’s going on in their community. And, as we’ve seen, what’s rushed to fill that vacuum too often is unreliable, unvetted, implausible conspiracy theories about the world. It’s created a media environment in which everything is nationalized, that local and even regional news finds daylight only occasionally and has to compete with the circus sideshow of Washington D.C.
Lookout in Santa Cruz didn’t drive its competitors on the local news scene out of business which, of course, was never the goal. But we have, I believe, made our competitors stronger and sharper in covering our area, just as they have made us stronger and sharper. We’re not perfect in our coverage and neither are our competitors. But right at a time when Santa Cruz County is undergoing enormous changes due to a growing number of big consequential housing projects, causing big ripple effects politically, economically and culturally, readers in our locality have a more vibrant and more compelling news scene than they would have if we had never come along.
As news consumers, we all have our habits, beliefs and attitudes about the news media. What Lookout has offered to the readers of Santa Cruz and can also offer to readers in Eugene/Springfield is a reset, a clearing of the tables, an opportunity to set new standards and expectations for news coverage in our cities, towns and neighborhoods. Old “legacy” media outlets still offer some appeal to consumers, but they are also saddled by ossified ways of doing business and serving the public, and haunted by old ways of thinking.
Lookout is fresh and new and full of energy, just as much for its reporters and editors as it is for its readers. As a veteran of four and a half years with this start-up, I’m more than a bit envious as that sense of possibility is just now unfolding in Eugene and Springfield. And just as in Santa Cruz, given the unpredictability of the nation as a whole, it’s arrived just in time.
