The Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation (CVJF) was launched in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the foundation is launching something else: the Coachella Valley Media Hall of Fame.
The inaugural class of four journalists will be inducted at a luncheon event at 11:30 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 28, at Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage. Former Washington Post editor Martin Baron will be the keynote speaker at the event, and the proceeds will benefit the CVJF.
The four new Hall of Famers: Longtime KESQ News Channel 3 broadcast journalist Karen Devine; former Desert Sun arts and entertainment reporter Bruce Fessier; and Frank Jones and his father, the late Milton Jones, publishers of Palm Springs Life.
CVJF co-founder Ricardo Loretta talked to the Independent about the origins of the foundation. It all started at a lunch with Julie Makinen, then the executive editor of The Desert Sun.
“I’ll never forget (that) during … COVID in August 2020,” Loretta said. “We couldn’t go inside a restaurant, because they had all closed their indoor dining, so we met on the patio of P.F. Chang’s, which was being cooled with misting devices and fans because it was August, and it was hot.”
Gannett, the parent company of The Desert Sun, had started yet another round of cuts.
“Julie told me … about Gannett cutting back on opinion editors,” Loretta said. “They were … offering, like, 500 employees around the country early buyouts. Our opinion editor (for The Desert Sun) at the time was Al Franco, who’d been there a long time, and he decided to take it. The only problem was that Gannett did not provide budgeting for any replacements. So Julie was distraught and said, ‘We can’t have a newspaper without an opinion page. It just becomes an advertising piece, if there’s no forum for community input and editorial (comment).’
“I told her that one of the things we could do is find out if the community wants a newspaper at all, and the best way to do that was to ask the community to support an opinion editor for at least a year after Al Franco leaves. I asked her how much money she would need. … It wasn’t a huge amount—but it wasn’t peanuts, so I suggested we do a 501(c)(3) and see if we can structure it in such a way that we can help all the media in the Coachella Valley.”
The CVJF was born.
“Joe Wallace was eager to help, and he became a co-founder of the project,” Loretta said. Wallace, the soon-to-retire CEO of the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership, acts as secretary/treasurer of the CVJF board of directors.
“For a while, it was just Julie, Joe and me on the board, because we wanted to see how the venture would go,” Loretta said. “In the first three to four months, we raised a lot of money, and the good news was that we raised it from a wide array of people who donated anywhere from $10 to $10,000. I think the average donation was about $115. Sowe did get a fairly robust number of people supporting us, and that gave us encouragement. It looked like there was support for a daily newspaper.”
As luck would have it, the return of a former Desert Sun editor who chose to retire in the Coachella Valley crystallized the CVJF team.
“Randy Lovely … came back to live here in Palm Springs with his husband after he retired from Gannett,” Loretta said. “He took an interest in our project, joined our board, and then agreed to take over as president, because he knows so much more about the (media) business than I do.”
Lovely and Makinen led the planning efforts for the Feb. 28 luncheon. (Makinen is now the editor-in-chief of The San Francisco Standard, a digital news startup in the Bay Area. She still has a house in the Coachella Valley and is on the CVJF board; she’s also the chair-elect of the California News Publishers Association.)
The event will be emceed by Emmy Award-winning journalist and Palm Springs resident Hank Plante. Baron will talk about his new book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, and share his insights regarding the future of journalism.
“I’m very thrilled about the reception (the event has) received so far,” Lovely said during a recent interview. “Ticket sales are going very, very well. The reaction to the individuals who we’ll be inducting in this first group has been 100% positive, which speaks to the depth of talent that we have in the community.
“I’m really excited to have a day on which we celebrate journalism, because there are so many negatives associated with the profession. It always disheartens me that journalists are ranked among the least-admired professions. Of course, I think it’s a noble profession. I know how hard journalists work. I know how much of a commitment it is, and that basically, they turn over their lives to their career, because news is not predictable.”
Bruce Fessier, a journalist for more than 40 years—with much of that time at The Desert Sun before his retirement—began his career as a high school and college sports writer. We asked him about his reaction to the news of his Hall of Fame induction.
“Not knowing that there were any plans to create a Hall of Fame, my reaction was, ‘What? Are you kidding?’ he said with a laugh. “… I know that (the CVJF) has been doing terrific work keeping local journalism alive, and I’m compelled to support that. It’s an honor to be recognized in the first class of the Coachella Valley Media Hall of Fame, but it’s more important to support journalism.
“It’s just remarkable to me that I would be selected over so many worthwhile candidates. One of the people coming to this luncheon is the widow of (longtime Los Angeles Times sportswriter) Jim Murray, who was my hero growing up. I met him out here when he had a place at Monterey Country Club, and after that, he moved to La Quinta. Because he lived out here and covered the (Bob) Hope Classic golf tournament and a lot of major events, he could be considered a local Coachella Valley journalist himself—and he’s one of the great sports writers of all time, if not the greatest sports writer. To be inducted with his widow in the audience is really a thrill for me. I’m very honored, and I don’t want to minimize the recognition. It’s just insane to me, actually.”
While there is unlikely to be a brick-and-mortar Coachella Valley Media Hall of Fame anytime soon, the CVJF board felt the time was right to start recognizing journalists who have spent a meaningful part of their careers covering life in the Coachella Valley.
“We don’t want to do one group (of inductees) and then never come back again,” Lovely said with a chuckle. “So we started talking about it, and we quickly built a database of almost 100 individuals who we felt could be worthy of consideration. … We feel like we have a really deep well of people who have either committed themselves here for decades and done great work here in the valley, or who had really good, strong careers, during which their time in the Coachella Valley was a formative chapter of that long career.”
There are several core goals that Lovely and the other board members believe will be served by staging an annual Hall of Fame event.
“I think there are three reasons (for the event): celebrate journalism; raise our profile as an organization; and raise money,” Lovely said. “We’ve already had conversations about next year’s event in terms of when we think the best time to do it would be, and who might be a good keynote speaker.”
While the CVJF was founded in an effort to pay for The Desert Sun’s opinion editor, the foundation has since broadened its support to other local journalism organizations (including KESQ News Channel 3 and the Coachella Valley Independent).
“Quite honestly, we haven’t been able to do as much as I would hope,” Lovely said. “That’s just because we’re limited by how much we’ve been able to raise. About 98% of what we raise goes right back to our grant-making. We have very low administrative costs. We’re an all-volunteer organization. How much money we raise will decide how much more we can do. So instead of funding full positions like the opinion-page editor, we started (thinking), ‘Let’s invest in future journalists by funding internships.’ That’s been a way for CVJF to assist other news organizations in the valley.”
The CVJF has also funded grants to assist media organizations with specific projects.
“So far, that’s mostly been travel grants to help with (travel expenses), but it could be something like, ‘We want to do a poll ahead of the upcoming election to assess the strength of the candidates in a certain race.’ We would consider those kinds of requests, because the money for those just doesn’t exist in newsroom budgets anymore.
“My hope is that in 2024, we can raise our visibility so that we can raise more money, because of what potentially we can do in terms of helping this whole ecosystem of organizations. There’s just so much more to be done.”
“Power and the Press: Lunch With Former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron,” the CVJF’s Coachella Valley Media Hall of Fame induction luncheon, will take place at 11:30 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 28, at Thunderbird Country Club, 70737 Country Club Drive, in Rancho Mirage. Individual tickets are $200, and are on sale until Feb. 16 or a sellout. For tickets, click here. For more information, visit cvjf.org.
