A rich rumor pipeline that ebbs and flows fuels talk in California’s prisons. At times, it makes sense to get out in front of the rumors to clarify or confirm. In fact, that is exactly why San Quentin News was established.
“The grapevine throbbed with weird gossip,” wrote Warden Clinton T. Duffy (San Quentin, 1940-1951) in his book The San Quentin Story. “I decided that the obvious answer, if we could swing it, would be a regular prison paper.” He continued: “The first edition of San Quentin News, hand-set and printed on gaudy green paper, was published Dec. 10, 1940.”
An untold number of publications appeared on “gaudy green paper,” or on other materials of inferior quality, before reaching the halfway point in the twentieth century. That was before the advent of the Internet, email, cell phones, and social media.
It’s no secret the California Department of Technology and CDCR entered into a contractual agreement with Global Tel*Link/Viapath to provide tablets to prisoners statewide.
By the time tablets arrived at San Quentin, Securus Technologies, LLC had already filed a petition for writ of mandate to set aside the contract. The courts have ruled in favor of Securus, but that’s another story.
Before I returned to the newspaper this year, I asked some of the senior staff why they were still printing 35,000 copies of the newspaper. It was a rhetorical question, but I knew the answer. Metaphorically, San Quentin News was stuck in the gears of a twentieth-century publication, one-quarter of the way into a new millennium. Read, bad business model.
Many American publications that have held onto old industry practices are singing their swan song. More to the point, we need to scale down printing and adopt new approaches to disseminating news if we are going to survive.
As tablet users in California prisons know, they have access to telephone calls, games, books, movies, music, news, Lexis Nexis, and apps. The Edovo app is where San Quentin News appears, but its current format makes it difficult to read at times, not to speak of the time it takes to load. Believe me, we know. But to make needed changes is not a straightforward process.
For example, Securus will provide new tablets in California prisons. Will those be similar to the GTL devices? We don’t know. Will Edovo be available? We hope so. What will the tablet screen look like? We don’t have that information. Answers to these questions will allow San Quentin News flexibility to reformat page design and layout of the newspaper to fit the new tablets.
Because GTL will cease to provide service in CDCR prisons, the newspaper is, for the moment, at a standstill on features such as font size and column size — one column or two? These are considerations we take into account to place stories on our website, tablets, and in the printed newspaper. We don’t yet have all the answers.
The CDCR has not funded the printing of San Quentin News since 2010. Support for the newspaper comes from grant funders, fundraising campaigns, and generous tax-deductible donations from our readers.
Initially, the Prison Media Project facilitated support, thanks to our long-time adviser, Steve McNamara. In 2013, when the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business provided us with a 56-page business plan (we call it the “Haas Plan”), then-student Jon Spurlock stayed on as an adviser and established Friends of San Quentin News. After Jesse Vasquez paroled as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, he transformed FoSQN into Pollen Initiative.
Marin Sun Printing has been printing San Quentin News, at cost, for 15 years. The majority of newsprint paper comes from Canada. The threat of tariffs could have driven the cost to produce the newspaper (SQN) up by 40%. Had the tariffs gone into effect, we would be saddled with a cost of $13,000 to print 35,000 newspapers. Then there are the costs to distribute the paper via mail and overnight courier.
To forestall a financial strain, the newspaper scaled down to 12 pages in order to include CCWF to give them space. It’s not just cost related.
A decade ago, one of our major grant funders told us they would not fund our operation indefinitely, therefore we had to figure out other methods of distribution. Knowing that, we had to figure other means to sustain the paper.
I am keenly aware of the challenges the Prison Media Project, FoSQN, and Pollen Initiative have faced, and with the assaults on organizations that fund anything that hints of diversity, equity, and inclusion, many grant funders are apprehensive about associating their name with the initials DEI.
After introduction of the Haas Plan, I became the paper’s associate editor. For five years, I ran the business side of the operation, where our team worked with volunteers to oversee budgets, donations, grants, distribution, correspondence, updates to the website, video production, newsletters, monthly reports, and more.
The staff never intended to take on business functions. All we wanted to do was write. Out of necessity though, we had to do more than write if we wanted to continue providing the incarcerated population a newspaper. No other media activity within the San Quentin media center has had the obligation or responsibility to do what San Quentin News has done. We’re stronger as a team because we’ve had to keep reinventing ourselves. Facing adversity, we pivot, adjust, and keep it moving.
I was on staff when one of my editor-in-chief predecessors, the late Arnulfo T. Garcia, shared his vision to place a copy of San Quentin News in the hands of every CDCR prisoner. We learned quickly it was an unrealistic goal. So we adjusted and made the paper accessible to the then 100,000-plus incarcerated in California.
The Haas Plan covered 12 years that commenced in 2013. At the time, the plan met with intense scrutiny because of its old business and paper model. But it was better than what we had, which was nothing. This year marks the end of that twelfth year.
Jesse Vasquez, executive director of Pollen Initiative, …made an arrangement with the Edovo Foundation to place all Pollen Initiative supported publications — which includes San Quentin News — on the Edovo app for the benefit of the incarcerated nationwide. Because of that, the newspaper is accessible on tablets provided by the vendor Global Tel*Link. Call it fate, fortune, or luck, but that allowed the newspaper to surpass its goal of providing a newspaper to 100,000-plus incarcerated.
As the Haas Plan winds down, some 1,350 lockup facilities have the potential to access San Quentin News electronically as 1,378 facilities actively read the newspaper on the Edovo app. That’s more than a half million prisoners, not to mention the availability of the paper on our website and at American Prison Newspapers at JStor.
In 2016, I interviewed McNamara for a story in the July issue of the newspaper. We discussed the future of journalism. McNamara said, “People will always want access to information. The question is how will the information be delivered?” In a 2019 issue of the newsletter Inside SQNews, he recalled the “paper’s humble beginnings.” I had to update a few of his statements to account for the six years that have since passed.
McNamara remembered the newspaper’s initial monthly press run of 5,000 copies, distributed to San Quentin residents only. It expanded, until recently, to a distribution of 35,000. By then, all CDCR prisons, some youth facilities, county jails, libraries, incarcerated persons outside California, hundreds of individual donors, and criminal justice representatives received the paper.
San Quentin News staff increased from four to as many as 18; advisers went from four to at least a dozen, and at one time, the total number of volunteers, in and out of the newsroom, numbered more than 50. The newspaper’s page count also increased from four to 24, and those pages went from black ink only to full color.
All of that cost a lot of money, and required a tremendous commitment from staff, volunteers and other stakeholders. Through these efforts, by September 2019, San Quentin News had raised more than $1 million dollars to fund its operation.
In spite of recent political attacks on organizations that fund so-called DEI groups, which consist of threats of audits by the IRS, withdrawing 501(c)(3) non-profit status, and the withholding of federal grants, San Quentin News and other publications are able to thrive and maintain their presence and influence by pivoting toward digital distribution.
Simply put, to get ahead of the noise, San Quentin News is going digital. In doing so, we have to remain vigilant to changes in the industry if we are to survive. We have to navigate the intricacies of publishing, staffing, fundraising, and all the other opportunities for growth and expansion.
Circumstances dictate that we must move away from printing on paper to better serve our readers and remain a sustainable publication, and that’s not a rumor.