Frequently Asked Questions About California Local

California Local is a network of newsrooms which aspires to cover all 58 counties, 480+ chartered municipalities and thousands of communities and neighborhoods of the state of California. 

We're also a news laboratory exploring how to do collaborative local community journalism on the Internet.

Ha. Nothing. It's all free and always will be. 

We think it's important for people of all income brackets, including no income, to have access to good local information.

That being said, we work with partners at the local, state and national level to fund and sustain our operations and growth. 

Individuals are also encouraged to contribute to California Local.

California Local is a for-profit California C Corporation.

Good question! We're funded by contributions from our members and our partners in the community.

You can also shop for California Local branded swag in our store.

California Local's staff of community researchers painstakingly gather and enter all of the Government and Community Group listings into our databases. 

It's a lot of work, but our database forms the foundation of how we use digital community journalism to facilitate connections and positive local action.

No. Never. Never ever ever.

You're not the product here.

Our weather infomation comes from a variety of sources:

• Current conditions and forecasts are courtesy of the fine folks at OpenWeather.
• Satellite images and weather alerts come from the fine folks at NOAA.
• Weather resources and tweets come from a variety of sources on the web.

Ultimately, most weather data and forecasts originate from the NOAA, which is a wonderful example of your federal tax dollars at work. Go NOAA!

Our traffic information comes from a variety of sources:

• Traffic camera images are updated every 10 minutes from the fine folks at Caltrans.
• Traffic incident alerts are courtesy of the fine folks of the California Highway Patrol.
• Traffic resources and tweets come from a variety of attributed sources on the web.

A special shout out of appreciation to the IT staff at Caltrans and CHP. 

Caltrans maintains an extensive network of weather and traffic sensors and traffic cameras, and makes their data easy to access at no cost to the public. (Which is good, because we already paid for it via taxes.)

The CHP dispatch centers provide traffic incident alerts on a close-to-realtime basis in a variety of easy-to-access digital formats.

The journalists at California Local follow the code of ethics enumerated by the Society of Professional Journalists.