Culture OC

To engage with Orange County’s artistic and cultural communities at every level by publishing news and critical analysis to encourage interest, participation, fellowship and dialogue.

In summer 2018, Paul Hodgins and Heide Janssen, both former arts journalists at The Orange County Register, joined forces to develop a news platform to showcase arts journalism in Orange County. Hodgins and Janssen began assembling a team of top working arts journalists in Orange County. Many of them formerly worked for the Register, LA Times and OC Weekly. Their expertise also helps Culture OC train the next generation of arts writers as they work with interns, some of whom have joined their ranks as contributing writers. In Sept. 2018, the first Arts & Culture story at Voice of OC is posted. It wins a 2019 National Arts Journalism Award. In 2020, writers Richard Chang and Anne Marie Panoringan join the ranks, and Contributing writers Timothy Mangan and Laura Bleiberg are invited by the Library of Congress to include their articles in its archive for their stories written for the our Decade Ahead series. Fast forward to 2023: The first stories written under the Culture OC masthead are published on cultureoc.org.

Accomplishments: We launched a new website in September 2023. We won several significant local, regional and national awards. We raised more than $100,000 for operations.

Goals: To grow in quality and quantity while improving our coverage of underserved communities.

Our needs:
1. Grow and stabilize operating budget at $150,000-$200,000 annually.
2. Create four administrative positions of 20 hours per week @ $25/hour.
3. Increase the number of stories to five per week.
4. Increase contractors' fees from $200 to $250-$350 per story or photo assignment.
5. Find ways to raise our profile in the community through sponsorships, meet-and-greet booths, and other means.

Orange County California

The fundamental goal of Culture OC is to consistently deliver fair, focused and thorough journalism on quality of life and arts issues for Orange County communities while encouraging civic engagement and civil discourse through our editorial pages and social channels. Our newsgathering is independent of commercial or political interests. We do not accept gifts of any kind in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. The newsroom is insulated from donors, sponsors and advertisers by a virtual firewall. We believe that news organizations have a responsibility to engage with the public on the values, issues and ideas of the day, and that we have much to gain in return. Culture OC is a participant in the Trust Project, a collaboration among news organizations around the world. Its goal is to create strategies that fulfill journalism’s basic pledge: to serve society with a truthful, intelligent and comprehensive account of ideas and events.

I am very proud to serve as Chair of the Advisory Board of Culture OC. As leader of the official nonprofit local arts agency for the County of Orange, I am probably one of the best-positioned and most-knowledgeable observers of the state of arts and culture journalism in our community today. The absolute decimation of such coverage over the past decade due to newspaper bankruptcies and consolidation left Orange County with virtually no news coverage on this beat, no feature writing, and no arts reviews. Yet ours is one of the most robust and vibrant arts communities in the nation. Perhaps the most important role of arts journalism is that it provides a platform for the discussion of those intangible feelings and thoughts that result from cultural experiences, the human interest stories that underscore both the commonality and exceptional talents of creative people, and educate the public about what it takes to ensure the continuity and health of those who produce and present the arts in our community. This is the role that Culture OC aspires to fulfill, and it is supported by artists, arts organization and university arts leaders, arts educators, and arts patrons. All of us in the Orange County arts community look forward to its continued evolution in the years ahead, and encourage those who care about this to contribute to its growth and development by providing the resources essential to achieve it.

Richard Stein

President & CEO, Arts Orange County

Chair, Culture OC Advisory Board