Berkeley Daily Planet
Encyclopedia
The Berkeley Daily Planet was a free weekly newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 published in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

.

The paper was politically progressive, and offered endorsements of progressive and liberal to left leaning candidates.

The Berkeley Daily Planet provided consistent coverage of City Council meetings, as well as other official city functions and commissions. The "Planet" distinguished itself from other local papers in its detailed coverage of local land use issues in the city.

History

The Berkeley Daily Planet was founded April 7, 1999 by a group of journalists and Stanford MBAs with funding from outside investors, according to a March 26, 1999 story in the San Francisco Chronicle. According to that article, the idea of calling the paper the Berkeley Daily Planet came from one of the MBAs, Dave Danforth. The Chronicle on April 8, 1999 reported that the new paper "quickly fell under a cloud when it was discovered that the paper's classified ads were taken from other newspapers." The Chronicle quoted attorneys as saying the practice of plagiarizing ads was questionable on copyright grounds and might constitute an unfair business practice, but no legal action was taken. In September 2000, the Daily Planet's owners, venture capitalists doing business as Bigfoot Media, started a second free daily, the San Mateo Daily Journal
San Mateo Daily Journal
The San Mateo Daily Journal is a daily newspaper published six days a week, Monday through Friday plus a combo Weekend edition. The newspaper is distributed throughout San Mateo County, California....

.

On November 22, 2002, the Berkeley Daily Planet folded. "Employees arrived at work this morning only to learn the newspaper's board of directors had decided to shutter the paper because of continuing financial losses," the Daily Californian wrote in its November 22, 2002 issue. The Daily Cal noted that the closing wasn't a surprise and that the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

 reported in January 2002 that the Daily Planet hadn't made a profit since its inception in 1999.

On April 1, 2003, Becky and Michael O'Malley—described by the Chronicle as a "liberal Berkeley couple who are grandparents and longtime activists" -- began publishing the Berkeley Daily Planet again, but only twice a week, Tuesday and Friday. However, they kept the word "Daily" in the paper's name.

Since the O'Malleys restarted the Planet with Michael O'Malley as publisher, Becky O'Malley as executive editor and Michael Howerton as managing editor, it has won a number of awards from the California Newspaper Publishers' Association and other organizations, including first prizes for its opinion page, which publishes lengthy reader-written commentaries, and the editorial cartoons of Justin DeFreitas.

Current Owners

Becky O'Malley, the executive editor and opinion page editor, worked in the civil rights and anti-war movements in Ann Arbor in the 1960s and early 1970s. She was a reporter and editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Pacific News Service in the late 1970s while attending law school. After passing the California Bar, she wrote articles for magazines, including The Nation and Mother Jones, and was on the staff of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her husband Michael O'Malley,now the Planet's publisher, is a former faculty member in the University of California's computer science department whose primary research was in the field of text-to-speech conversion technology. The couple founded a company in the early 1980s, Berkeley Speech Technologies, which developed commercial text-to-speech software and hardware. They sold it to a Belgian speech technology corporation, Lernout & Hauspie
Lernout & Hauspie
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a leading Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001...

,in 1996. After the speech company was sold, Becky O'Malley served on Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission for 7 years, resigning after taking over the editor's job at the Planet.

Editorial controversies

O'Malley wrote in 2004 that the paper repeatedly was criticized for its position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...

.

In August 2006, the paper published a letter, later characterized by some readers as an anti-Semitic diatribe, in the opinion section of the Planet. It was a response from an Iranian student living in India to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and included his charge that Jews were to blame for the Holocaust. Two open letters containing criticisms were sent to Ms. O'Malley by local politicians and Jewish leaders and were published in the August 11th issue of the Daily Planet.

Struggling financially in the bad economy, in early 2009 The Planet published a full front page asking for donations, resulting in $12,000 in the first two weeks. In March 2009 the paper ran a letter from the proprietor of Urban Ore reporting that a Jim Sinkinson, representing “East Bay Citizens for Journalistic Responsibility”, asked her to stop advertising there; she claimed that he misrepresented what the Planet had been publishing. Shortly after the paper printed an editorial "An Open Letter to Our Advertisers and Readers" to "clarify the policies of the paper, its overall mission, and the nature of this campaign of intimidation."

On March 28, 2009, J Weekly, the weekly newspaper serving the Bay Area Jewish community, published an article about the controversy in which Sinkinson denied pressuring or threatening advertisers.

DPWatchDog is a website that has been established to track alleged anti-Semitism and other forms of alleged journalistic malfeasance in the Berkeley Daily Planet. In November 2009, the long-running dispute was covered in the New York Times.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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