{"id":521,"date":"2026-08-06T20:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/?p=521"},"modified":"2026-09-22T16:59:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T16:59:18","slug":"breaking-new-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/breaking-new-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking New Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">The\u00a0<em>San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>\u00a0 decided on a new kind of community outreach in its &#8220;Voice of the Voter&#8221; partnership last year with KRON-TV and KQED-FM.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">On Aug. 19 the paper announced that voter registration forms would be inserted in the 560,000 issues distributed Sept. 23.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">Political Editor Susan Yoachum was assigned to negotiate with the Secretary of State&#8217;s office. &#8220;When I first called them I would say that the reaction ranged from laughter to incredulity,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Nobody had ever wanted to do this and it had never been done &#8212; so we were breaking new ground.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">The state agreed to provide the forms but said the paper would have to pay about $25,000 to cover the printing and mailing costs. A few days later, the office offered to provide the forms at no cost.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">Yoachum knows some journalists believe newspapers should not be encouraging people to vote. &#8220;There are some levels of involvement that I&#8217;m not particularly comfortable with either, but a level of involvement that essentially promotes practicing democracy is safe.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, sans-serif, arial;\">Others soon jumped on the bandwagon, said national editor Jim Brewer, who oversaw the &#8220;Voice of the Voter.&#8221; The\u00a0<em>San Jose Mercury,<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0<em>Contra Costa Times,<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0<em>Alameda Newspaper Group<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0<em>Riverside Press Enterprise<\/em>\u00a0also included the forms, which were color coded to show which paper distributed them. All told, 39,511 voters registered via the newspaper forms; 15,640 from the\u00a0<em>Chronicle<\/em>\u00a0alone.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle\u00a0 decided on a new kind of community outreach in its &#8220;Voice of the Voter&#8221; partnership last year with KRON-TV and KQED-FM. On Aug. 19 the paper announced that voter registration forms would be inserted in the 560,000 issues distributed Sept. 23. Political Editor Susan Yoachum was assigned to negotiate with the Secretary [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,71,73,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catalyst-by-date","category-civic-catalyst","category-impact","category-spring-1995"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5380,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/5380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}