CalMatters: digital journalism as a safeguard for democracy

Dave Lesher, founder of CalMatters, wants to ensure more transparency in politics from Sacramento. The picture shows the California State Capitol. Justin Sullivan / AFP

With his own social media platforms and endless stream of announcements, US President Donald Trump continues to dominate the headlines. In California, a digital investigative platform, CalMatters, is striking back, aiming to strengthen democracy.

“Donald Trump eclipses everything else in terms of media attention,” says journalist Dave Lesher. Coverage of the US president, he notes, consumes much of the media’s resources and weakens reporting on many other important local and regional events and developments. Lesher spent many years covering Californian politics for the Los Angeles Times.

Rapid digitalisation over the past few years, he believes, has turbocharged this trend, and the numbers back him up. According to the latest State of Local News report published by Northwestern University in Evanston, near Chicago, almost 40% of the nearly 9,000 local titles that once existed in the US have disappeared over the past two decades.

The report labels nearly 200 districts as “news deserts” with no local reporting. It was precisely in these areas where Trump achieved a landslide victory in last November’s presidential elections.  

Read our article on how digitalisation can be as democratic as possible:

News deserts spread across the world

According to the World Justice Report (WJP), an NGO with offices in Washington, Mexico City and Singapore, the spread of news deserts is a “global phenomenon”.

With the digitalisation of the media, the business model of many traditional newspapers based on advertising and subscriptions has collapsed. On the digital market, major platforms such as Meta and Google dominate advertising, while it is hard to sell subscriptions for online outlets. This trend, the WJP warns in a studyExternal link, is undermining informed public debate in democracies.

Ten years ago, even before Trump’s first term in office, Lesher set up the non-profit media outlet CalMattersExternal link. “We are funded by donations and ensure greater transparency in politics,” Lesher told Swissinfo in Sacramento, where he had gathered the team behind the research tool Digital DemocracyExternal link for the day.

The “Digital Democracy” research tool from CalMatters. calmatters.com

The team includes not only journalists, marketing experts and political analysts, but also Foaad Khosmood, professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

“With Digital Democracy, we initially wanted to create a platform that would enable citizens to gain better insight into the legislative process,” Khosmood recalls. “This failed because the data we collected was too inaccurate and not clear enough.” The result: hardly any users and little impact.

More visibility, stronger AI and smaller target group

On the day Trump was first elected to the White House in November 2016, Californian voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring all hearings and debates in both parliamentary chambers to be recorded and made public within 24 hours.

“This reform, the development of artificial intelligence, and our decision to target the platform at a different audience were game changers,” Khosmood says. “The database is now aimed at media professionals who use Digital Democracy for their research.”

One such user is investigative journalist Julie Watts. During a chat in the open-plan office of the news channel CBS in Sacramento, she makes clear just how useful the platform has become. “I use Digital Democracy every day and for almost all of my stories,” she says, diving straight into an example.

“Let’s see what we have on ‘electoral district reform’, the so called ‘gerrymandering.” This issue is once again making the headlines in the US after the state of Texas passed a reform ahead of the 2026 elections which aims at increasing the number of Republican representatives in Congress.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has recently launched a countermeasure, the so-called Proposition 50 which Californians will vote on on November 4, 2025.

More than 100,000 transcripts

By typing in just a few search terms, Digital Democracy quickly gives Watts a clear overview of statements from prominent Democratic Party members who recently spoke out against electoral reform.

“Within seconds, the system provides me with videos, quotes and background information that I can use directly in my reporting. In the past, this took me a lot of time,” says the award-winningExternal link investigative journalist.

Investigative journalist Julie Watts in Sacramento. Bruno Kaufmann / Swissinfo

In addition to more than 100,000 transcripts, Digital Democracy links all available financial information, reports from social and other media and entries from legislative records. “I can quickly check whether a politician who is prominent in environmental policy also receives campaign funds from the oil industry,” Watts says.

Watts’ reporting supported by Digital Democracy and artificial intelligence (AI) is making an impact. “By analysing over a million votes in parliament and thousands of hours of hearings, I was able to show how more than 2,000 laws failed because members of parliament did not participate in crucial votes.” As a result, better-informed citizens have launched popular initiatives on several pressing issues, such as how to tackle the drug fentanyl.

Read about Karl Bürkli, the Swiss who inspired direct democracy in US states such as California:

According to Swiss AI and media expert Reto Vogt, the example shows that a research platform like Digital Democracy needs more than just strong transparency rules and accessible data – it also takes an understanding of political nuances and casual links to interpret the data correctly. “In Switzerland, for instance, AI models still lack sufficiently large datasets, especially in local journalism.”

While politics is fairly well covered in Sacramento despite Trump’s overwhelming media presence, the more southern Central Valley has only a handful of local media outlets left.

“Many of our local newspapers have disappeared or now belong to large hedge funds, which use the medium as an advertising platform and mouthpiece for their own interests,” says Brianna Vaccari, editor-in-chief of the Merced Focus, an online newspaper in the small town of Merced. The publication has no office of its own and only a few employees. “We’re part of a collective of journalists in the Central Valley that is funded by grants from foundations and private individuals,” she explains.

Investigating drinking water quality

A few weeks ago Vaccari received an alert from Digital Democracy that a Democratic representative from her coverage area had submitted a bill to shield public water providers from lawsuits over water quality issues. “That surprised me greatly, and I investigated the matter,” says Vaccari. During her investigations for the story, which caused quite a stir in Merced, Vaccari was supported by a colleague from CalMatters. “We were able to demonstrate the health and financial consequences of the new government regulations on water quality,” she says.

In the end, citizens who are well-informed about what is happening in their communities are exactly the people CalMatters hopes to reach, regardless of their political affiliation, Vaccari stresses. The aim is to bridges political and ideological divides.

Edited by Mark Livingston. Adapted from German by Billi Bierling/ts