Pacific News Service
Overview
Pacific News Service, known as PNS, was a nonprofit alternative news agency based in California, first in Berkeley and later in San Francisco. Founded in 1969 as an independent source of reporting and analysis on the United States' role in Vietnam, it evolved over nearly five decades into a communications hub for journalists, scholars, filmmakers and young people, dedicated to bringing seldom-heard voices into the public forum. It syndicated reporting and commentary to newspapers nationwide, produced documentary work, and in 1996 founded New America Media, the collaboration of ethnic media that became its best-known offspring. PNS ceased operations at the end of November 2017.
What distinguished PNS from a conventional wire was its method. Rather than competing with the Associated Press on breaking news, it sought out trends before they became headlines — immigration, demographic change, youth alienation, the growth of ethnic media — and it recruited writers from the communities experiencing those changes, treating lived experience as a form of expertise.
Founding in the Vietnam Era
PNS was founded in 1969 by Franz Schurmann, a historian and sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who had headed its Center for Chinese Studies, and Orville Schell, a journalist and author who later became dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Their original mission was to supply mainstream newspapers with independent expert sources and reporting on the American role in Indochina during the Vietnam War — coverage that questioned official accounts at a time when much of the press still relied heavily on government briefings.
The service offered editors an alternative channel: scholars and reporters with regional knowledge whose analysis did not simply echo Washington. That founding purpose — connecting newsrooms to independent expertise and to voices outside officialdom — remained the organisation's signature long after the war that prompted it had ended.
Reinvention Under Sandy Close
After the Vietnam War ended, PNS changed direction. From 1974, under executive editor Sandy Close, who became its executive director, it turned its attention from the Far East to the United States, especially California and the American West. Close led the organisation for more than four decades, an unusually long tenure that made her synonymous with it.
Under Close, PNS specialised in identifying trends that were little noted at first but proved epoch-making: mass immigration, the computer and information revolution, the spread of religious fundamentalism, the isolation of inner cities, America's growing entanglement with Mexico and Central America, the emergence of marginalised and sometimes violent youth, and the shifting landscape of race relations in a California where ethnic minorities were becoming the new majority population. PNS stories were written by and about people on the margins of society, and its daily syndicate placed those perspectives in mainstream newspapers.
Services and Operations
PNS operated a news-wire and syndication service supplying features and commentary to newspapers across the country. It also sponsored magazine articles and books, produced television segments — including essays by Richard Rodriguez for the PBS NewsHour — and supported documentary films, among them Breathing Lessons, the portrait of writer Mark O'Brien, which won an Academy Award and which Close co-produced.
The organisation functioned as an incubator as much as a wire. Editors fluent in languages including Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Arabic and Spanish monitored ethnic media, summarising and translating stories so that experiences reported in one community could inform readers in others. Close herself had been one of the first regular commentators on NPR's Morning Edition in the mid-1980s, and PNS talent moved regularly between its own projects and national outlets.
Youth Media: YO! and The Beat Within
In 1991 Close created YO! Youth Outlook, a multimedia collective producing youth-centred news content. YO! published a monthly print magazine written by and about young people, hosted youth forums and speak-outs, offered journalism internships, and produced radio and television under the YO! name; the magazine and YO!TV continued until 2015.
In 1996 Close co-founded The Beat Within with social worker David Inocencio. The project ran weekly writing and discussion workshops in Bay Area juvenile detention facilities and compiled the work of incarcerated young people into a weekly magazine of writing and art. The model expanded to dozens of juvenile halls in the Bay Area, with pilot programmes in other regions including Washington, D.C. For many participants, publication in The Beat was a first experience of being treated as an author rather than a case number — an illustration, in miniature, of the PNS philosophy of giving voice to the voiceless.
New California Media and New America Media
In 1996 PNS founded New California Media, a collaboration of ethnic news outlets in California, which later went national as New America Media. It served as a clearinghouse for news and features from and about America's ethnic communities, ran editorial and marketing workshops and an annual Expo and Awards — dubbed the ethnic Pulitzers by the PBS NewsHour — conducted multilingual polling on issues affecting ethnic Californians, and maintained a national directory of ethnic media with more than 2,500 partners.
The idea behind it, as Close explained, grew from editors convening ethnic-media journalists who wanted a kind of Associated Press of ethnic media: communities curious about one another's lives, and editors eager to lift their audiences out of parochialism into a more cosmopolitan view. By the 2010s, the combined reach of ethnic media in the United States was estimated at more than 60 million people, roughly one in four adults, and New America Media was the largest editorial and marketing collaboration among them.
Recognition
Close received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius award — in 1995, honoured for giving voice to the voiceless through PNS; she used the moment to help launch new ventures including The Beat Within and New California Media. In 2011 she received the George Polk Career Award, and in 2012 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard selected her for the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, recognising her work for ethnic news organisations and her mentoring of young journalists. The selection committee's chair, former Nieman curator Bill Kovach, credited her with almost single-handedly nourishing and keeping alive small media projects in Black and ethnic communities across the country.
Closure in 2017
On 1 November 2017 the board of directors announced that Pacific News Service and New America Media would cease operations by 30 November 2017. Close explained that the organisation had grown too fast and had been reluctant to cut programmes after their funding expired, reaching a point where it was no longer sustainable as constituted. Tributes followed from across the journalism world, including from writers whose careers had begun in its youth projects; one San Francisco Chronicle journalist recalled being an incarcerated teenager in 1996 when Close gave him his first writing assignment in The Beat Within workshops.
Influence on Ethnic Media
The polling and convening work PNS built through New California Media and New America Media changed how American institutions regarded ethnic media: outlets once treated as marginal were documented, counted and presented to advertisers, foundations and policymakers as a sector reaching tens of millions of readers, listeners and viewers, often in languages other than English and often as those audiences' most trusted source of news. That reframing outlived the organisation that performed it.
Legacy
Pacific News Service demonstrated, over forty-eight years, that a small nonprofit wire could shape national coverage by listening to communities the mainstream press overlooked. It anticipated the demographic transformation of California and the country, built durable institutions for ethnic and youth media, and trained generations of reporters who carried its habits — multilingual sourcing, attention to margins, suspicion of official narratives — into newsrooms nationwide. Although PNS itself closed in 2017, projects it nurtured, notably The Beat Within, and the ethnic-media networks it assembled, continued the work it began in Berkeley in 1969.
