"Prop Zero," a three-year-old website maintained by California's NBC television stations and devoted to essays on California political issues, is calling it quits.
Joe Mathews, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and co-author of a book about California's governance problems, "California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It," who was the site's chief blogger, announced its closure in a final posting over the weekend.
"It has been a wonderful run," Mathews wrote. "But after this election, I was exhausted, and had come to feel like the blog had run its course. NBC, which had supported Prop Zero strongly despite its relatively small audience, saw things the same way.
"The state is in a different place than it was three years ago - still facing profound challenges and governance problems, but with different leaders, a different political context, and different burning issues. After a rash of ballot measures and reform efforts, we may be entering a lull in efforts to fix California -- and those efforts were a focus of this blog."
Mathews and other regular contributors - journalists and academics, mostly - posted thousands of essays during the three-year run, focusing mostly on the difficulties of governing a large and fractious state.
In his final post, Mathews listed "five tips for the road that Californians must walk..." They are to simplify the governmental structure, avoid scapegoating for failures, take a large view of issues, build on the state's strengths, and create a better political system.
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