California Watch

California Watch, part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, began producing stories in 2009. The official launch of the California Watch website took place in January 2010. The team was best known for producing well researched and widely distributed investigative stories on topics of interest to Californians. In small ways, the newsroom pioneered in the digital space, including listing the names of editors and copy editors at the bottom of each story, custom-editing stories for multiple partners, developing unique methods to engage with audiences and distributing the same essential investigative stories to newsrooms across the state. It worked with many news outlets, including newspapers throughout the state, all of the ABC television affiliates in California, KQED radio and television and dozens of websites. The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch with $3.5 million in seed funding. The team won several industry awards for its public interest reporting, including the George Polk Award in 2012. In addition to numerous awards won for its investigative reports, the California Watch website also won an Online Journalism Award in the general excellence category from the Online News Association in its first year of existence.