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| Type | Weekly newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Tabloid |
| Owner | Independent |
| Publisher | Michael O'Malley |
| Editor | Becky O'Malley |
| Founded | April 7, 1999 |
| Ceased publication | March 2010 (print) |
| Headquarters | 3023A Shattuck Ave. Berkeley,CA 94705 United States |
| Website | berkeleydailyplanet.com |
The Berkeley Daily Planet was a free weeklynewspaper published inBerkeley, California, which continues today as an internet-based news publication.
TheDaily Planet is politicallyprogressive, and offers endorsements of progressive and liberal to left leaning candidates.
TheBerkeley Daily Planet provides coverage of City Council meetings as well as other official city functions and commissions. ThePlanet distinguishes itself from other local news sources in its detailed coverage of local land use issues in the city.
TheBerkeley Daily Planet was founded April 7, 1999 by a group of journalists and Stanford MBAs with funding from outside investors.[1] In September 2000, theDaily Planet's owners, doing business as Bigfoot Media, started a second free daily, theSan Mateo Daily Journal.
On November 22, 2002, due to the soft Bay Area retail economy, theBerkeley Daily Planet suspended publishing temporarily. "Employees arrived at work this morning only to learn the newspaper's board of directors had decided to shutter the paper," theDaily Californian wrote in its November 22, 2002 issue. TheDaily Cal noted that theLos Angeles Times speculated in January 2002 that theDaily Planet had not made a profit since its inception in 1999, a contention the owners said was not true.
On April 1, 2003, Becky and Michael O'Malley—described by theSan Francisco Chronicle as a "liberal Berkeley couple who are grandparents and longtime activists"[2]—began publishing theBerkeley 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 thePlanet 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.
On February 4, 2010 thePlanet broke a story that "Clickbooks.com", their own payroll firm, had conducted fraud. The firm had under-reported employee income to the IRS, and pocketed the difference in payroll tax.
In March, 2010, theDaily Planet ceased production of its print edition altogether, and since then it has been online only. Financial reasons were cited by its publishers. Almost from its inception theDaily Planet published an online version, in addition to its newsprint edition. The online archives go back to April 1, 2000.
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 theSan Francisco Bay Guardian andPacific News Service in the late 1970s while attending law school. After passing the California Bar, she wrote articles for magazines, includingThe Nation andMother Jones, and was on the staff of theCenter for Investigative Reporting. Her husband Michael O'Malley, now thePlanet's publisher, is a former faculty member in theUniversity of California'scomputer science department whose primary research was in the field oftext-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, 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.
O'Malley wrote in 2004 that the paper repeatedly was criticized for its position on theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict.[3] In August 2006, the paper published a letter, later characterized by some readers as an anti-Semitic diatribe, in the opinion section of thePlanet. 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 theDaily Planet.[4]
Struggling financially in the bad economy, in early 2009 theDaily Planet published a full front page asking for donations, resulting in $12,000 in the first two weeks.[5] In March 2009 the paper ran a letter from the proprietor ofUrban 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 thePlanet had been publishing.[6] The paper subsequently printed "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";[7] Sinkinson denied pressuring or threatening advertisers.[8] The dispute was covered inThe New York Times in November 2009.[9]
