Joe Donnelly, former senior editor at LA Weekly and co-founder of the quarterly reader Slake: Los Angeles, will become the executive editor of the Santa Barbara Journalism Initiative, a new nonprofit investigative-journalism project founded earlier this year. The hire was announced on Noozhawk Dec. 20 by Steven Ainsley, board chair of the initiative.
In July the Knight Foundation presented the initiative with a two-year, $502,000 grant, which has been matched by “several local foundations,” according to Ainsley. The project will be the city’s first investigative-journalism nonprofit and will work alongside traditional news outlets. It will be based at Santa Barbara’s Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, which also publishes the magazine Pacific Standard.
Donnelly will begin his role in early January, according to the release. More information about the newsroom can be found in an October story in the Columbia Journalism Review.