For the third year, Berkeleyside will join with dozens of Bay Area media outlets for one day of coverage focused on people living on the streets and in shelters.
The idea is simple: shine a spotlight on one of the region’s most persistent problems. By running dozens of stories on the causes of and solutions to homelessness — and what life is like for the thousands living on the streets — there may be a slight shift in the universe that leads to a more informed electorate and stronger decision making.
“Four years ago, The San Francisco Chronicle spearheaded a revolutionary news coverage effort with our colleagues from more than 100 news outlets,” Audrey Cooper, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, wrote in June to describe the project. “The SF Homeless Project made headlines for the novel way it brought competitors together to shake the public and politicians out of our collective sense of hopelessness. This is a crisis that is well within our ability to solve, but we lacked the public willpower to consider new solutions. It’s the media’s job to provoke discourse; the SF Homeless Project accepted that role and took it further, almost willing anyone not to pay attention during one focused day of mass coverage of the causes of and solutions to homelessness.”
Berkeleyside is joining about 30 other media outlets in this effort on Wednesday. Other participants include The Chronicle, KQED, Google News Lab, Mission Local, The Bold Italic, The Potrero View, KRON-4, 48Hills, Bay City Beacon, InMenlo, Castro Valley Matters, KGO-810, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco Public Press, KTVU, Sing Tao Daily, TechCrunch, Stories Behind the Fog, ABC-7, The E’ville Eye, Silicon Valley magazine, San Francisco magazine, KALW, the San Francisco Examiner and KPIX.
Berkeleyside won an award in explanatory journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists, NorCal chapter, for the SF Homeless Project stories we ran in 2016. We participated again in 2017 and now in 2019.
You can find most of the coverage from the 30+ media outlets by following the SF Homeless Project on Facebook.
