California Watch, part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, began producing stories in 2009. The official launch of the California Watch website took place in January 2010. The team was best known for producing well researched and widely distributed investigative stories on topics of interest to Californians. In small ways, the newsroom pioneered in the digital space, including listing the names of editors and copy editors at the bottom of each story, custom-editing stories for multiple partners, developing unique methods to engage with audiences and distributing the same essential investigative stories to newsrooms across the state. It worked with many news outlets, including newspapers throughout the state, all of the ABC television affiliates in California, KQED radio and television and dozens of websites. The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch with $3.5 million in seed funding. The team won several industry awards for its public interest reporting, including the George Polk Award in 2012. In addition to numerous awards won for its investigative reports, the California Watch website also won an Online Journalism Award in the general excellence category from the Online News Association in its first year of existence. History In 2009, the California Watch team began creating reports on statewide issues. The team's mission was to highlight stories related to education, immigration, the environment, politics, public safety, and other areas of public interest. At the time of its launch, California Watch had seven reporters, two multimedia producers, and two editors. Robert J. Rosenthal hired Mark Katches as the editorial director and Louis Freedberg as director. Katches had led investigative reporting teams at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he edited two Pulitzer Prize winning projects and at the Orange County Register. Freedberg was previously a reporter, Washington correspondent, editorial board member and columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and had reported for a wide range of outlets in both radio and print. The reporting team included Lance Williams, who uncovered the BALCO steroids in sports scandal while an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. California Watch started with offices in Berkeley and Sacramento, California. California Watch hired three additional reporters in mid-2010. Among them was Ryan Gabrielson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on abusive practices in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. California Watch shares its editors, TV producers, multimedia producers, news applications developers, data analysts and radio production with the Center for Investigative