Donohue’s primary task before the launch was to reestablish contact with sources from his days covering city politics for the Daily Transcript . In doing so, he explained that Voice of San Diego was a nonprofit website devoted to investigative and public service reporting. Donohue recalls:

[The project] met with a lot of skepticism. The people who know me best and who are my best sources [said], OK, cool, great, I’m just glad you’re back in town and writing. But other people who I didn’t know extremely well were just [dismissive, wondering]… "Is it going to be a blog?"… Blog was still kind of a dirty word back then. "Are you guys going to be controlled by some sort of outside forces?"

… In [early 2005], I can’t tell you how many complaints we got that we [would not be] printed, and then how skeptical everybody was that you could run a nonprofit like this… There was public radio and public television to think about, but there was no model to follow doing text-based journalism online and just funding it from a nonprofit standpoint. [1]

Donohue found his former colleague Lewis, now residing in South Carolina, a valuable resource as he got up to speed on city politics. There would be plenty to cover. Legal challenges to the outcome of November’s mayoral election—in which incumbent Mayor Dick Murphy seemed in danger of losing his seat to a write-in candidate—dragged on for weeks. At issue was the very legality of a write-in candidacy, on which two applicable San Diego laws contradicted each other. [2] Mayor Murphy took the oath of office to begin his second term on December 8, over a month after the election, and only after a court invalidated 5,500 ballots. [3] New legal challenges to Murphy’s reelection spilled into the next year. All the while, San Diego remained hamstrung by bad credit, unable to borrow badly needed funds for municipal projects.

Launch . The Voice of San Diego launched as planned on February 9, 2005. Donohue and McLaughlin settled into a rhythm of posting two to four stories a day on “mayhem at City Hall,” in Donohue’s words. The site featured Morgan as a columnist, and other local writers known to the staff or board offered their perspective on city issues as well, mostly for free. In May 2005, Lewis began contributing a regular column from South Carolina.

Other than San Diego, however, there was no unifying theme to the site. Opinion writers commented on whatever they wished to, and Editor Bry gladly accepted the content. Meanwhile, Donohue and McLaughlin had already started breaking stories related to the city’s troubled pension fund. But as the months progressed, Donohue began to worry that the site lacked a “personality”—a clear perspective or motivation. Lewis, with whom Donohue was in regular touch, agreed; he thought the site was “chaotic.” Lewis reflects:

I think a broader problem that a lot of new media entrepreneurs faced during this period… is the desire to replicate the newspaper online, in the sense of be everything to everybody, but better. [4]

The result was an unfocused hodgepodge. Voice of San Diego had a staff of only four and an annual budget in the hundreds of thousands. By comparison, the Union-Tribune , whose coverage gaps Voice of San Diego was founded to address, still had hundreds of editorial employees and a multimillion-dollar yearly budget. [5]