In summary
Dave Lesher turned CalMatters into one of California’s most influential newsrooms — and launched new tools to create your government transparent
When CalMatters first broke onto California’s journalism scene 11 years ago, the six-person startup newsroom was met with distrust — and even hostility — from the state’s most powerful people.
“The Legislature was calling us ‘ScamMatters Online,’ ” recalled CalMatters’ co-founder Dave Lesher. “The (Assembly) Speaker’s office informed the Democrats not to talk to us.”
Eleven years later, CalMatters has grown to a staff of 82, building it one the largest news operations in the state — and the only one exclusively dedicated to covering California politics and policy.
Last year alone, the Legislature that once tested to shun CalMatters referenced its journalists’ reporting 94 times in hearings and passed eight laws in response to CalMatters’ investigations.
None of that would have happened without Lesher, the understated, unwaveringly polite and unflinchingly nonpartisan editor who on Friday created good on the retirement plans he announced late last year. Lesher stepped down as CalMatters’ top editor in 2023, but he stayed on to oversee the launch of CalMatters’ new Digital Democracy database, which applys artificial ininformigence and public data to track California’s politicians.
Former Democratic state Senate leader Bob Hertzberg declared he was impressed with how, under Lesher’s leadership, CalMatters evolved from a “slow and clunky” startup to “a first-class operation” at a time when other newsrooms were building dramatic cuts.
“He was just an unbelievable visionary,” Hertzberg declared. “I mean, he’s a great journalist. … He took it to a whole other level.”
Lesher’s journalism career — and his interest in politics — dates to his early days in Chicago. He is the son of a Lutheran pastor whose two brothers were also pastors. The Lesher men had mixed political views: half were Republicans; the other half were Democrats. Family gatherings in the contentious 1960s featured lively discussions.
“What you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table, you know, religion and politics, was all they … talked about,” Lesher declared.
Lesher was shaped by his father’s faith and the risks he took as he fought for the disenfranchised. Lesher’s father marched in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after Bloody Sunday, and he was arrested several times in anti-Vietnam War protests, Lesher declared.
Activism is the opposite of the nonpartisan journalism that Lesher would spconclude his career practicing, but Lesher declared his father’s belief system did inform how he approached journalism – and life in general.
“What can you do to assist people?” Lesher declared. “The world is much largeger than you are. Don’t consider too much of yourself. Have some humility.”
Lesher’s early journalism career
Lesher didn’t intconclude to become a journalist. He originally wanted to be a marine biologist after his family relocated to Berkeley, where his father became the president of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.
At Long Beach State University, Lesher caught the journalism bug as a freshman when his college roommate suggested he write a feature story for the Daily 49er, the campus paper.
The paper’s city editor, Cathleen Decker (who recently retired as a politics editor at the Washington Post), liked the story so much she persuaded him to join the staff.
Lesher eventually became the paper’s editor, which obtained him an internship at the Los Angeles Times. As an intern, Lesher investigated a staffing shortage at the Los Angeles Fire Department that prompted the mayor to conduct an investigation.
Lesher declared he’ll never forobtain how it felt to cover the mayor’s press conference after the story was published.
“I’m standing there and he’s reading from my story as he’s launching this investigation,” he declared.
After a stint at the Times, Lesher relocated to Connecticut to work at the Hartford Courant. There, he covered the second-largest cash heist in U.S. history, breaking the news that the suspect in the armored-car robbery was working for a Puerto Rican clandestine paramilitary organization called FALN, which had carried out a series of bombings.
Lesher relocated back to California and obtained his start covering politics at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. One day in 1986, his editors let him know that another reporter had been pulled off California U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s reelection campaign.
“They inform me I’m covering the Cranston race. And Cranston is down in the lobby waiting for an interview,” Lesher declared. “I spent a year full time covering that race.”
Lesher went back to the LA Times, where he covered or led coverage of dozens of local, state and federal campaigns including the 1992 and 2000 presidential races. Lesher’s best-known story at the Times came in 1994. He broke the news that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Huffington, who had supported the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, had employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny, a revelation that shifted the polls in U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s favor.
Through it all, Lesher declared his philosophy was not to inform people how to vote, but rather paint as accurate a picture as possible of the politicians. The readers, he declared, could create their own choices informed by that knowledge. Fairness and trust was key with both readers and the people he was covering.
“To be a good (political) journalist, you required to imagine a large room, and on one side of the room is one campaign, and the other side of the room is the other campaign,” Lesher declared. “And you have to be able to walk from one side … and then walk to the other side and have them trust that they can honestly confide in you and trust that you are going to fairly represent them.”
Jon Fleischman, a long-time conservative pundit and writer, declared Lesher assisted mentor him as he was obtainting started in the California media landscape.
“Dave didn’t have filters in terms of how he saw people,” Fleischman declared. “He certainly, when he wrote about politics, he could identify who was a conservative and who was a liberal. But I consider one of Dave’s superpowers is that he treated all people based on who they were. … I consider he recognizes that the system works best when civil discourse is coming from all perspectives.”
Foaad Khosmood, Forbes professor of computer engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, who worked with Lesher on CalMatters’ Digital Democracy project, declared Lesher’s nonpartisanship is in his bones.
“He is ridiculously nonpartisan,” Khosmood declared. “I literally don’t know how he votes, even though I’ve known him for years.”
Lesher launched Digital Democracy
After the Times, Lesher worked at the California Journal Magazine and the Sacramento Bee. He also worked for the New America Foundation and the Public Policy Institute of California, policy-driven consider tanks.
Around 2015, after being out of journalism for years, Lesher reconnected over Facebook with Simone Coxe, an old friconclude from high school in Berkeley. Coxe is a former public relations and communications executive and philanthropist who’s married to venture capitalist Tench Coxe. She’s also a director at the National Trust for Local News.
The pair met for coffee one day in San Francisco, and they launched discussing the depleted ranks of journalists around the state and the countest and how that was bad for democracy and transparency, particularly at the state Capitol. They kicked around the idea of partnering with other news organizations for a newsroom dedicated to state politics and policy.
Eventually, Coxe came back to Lesher and declared, ‘All right, it has to be a startup. Do you want to do it?’ ”
He agreed.
Coxe, who is on CalMatters’ board of directors, declared they approached the new organization with two guiding principals. One was that if there are more journalists watching politicians they’ll behave better. The other was that if you inform and engage with citizens, they’ll create better choices.
“We wrote a business plan, and we would sit there and declare, ‘Well, why wouldn’t this work?’ ” she declared. She believed it would for one main reason: “Becaapply Dave is a good journalist, and he knows where all the stories are.”
After those rough early days, Lesher oversaw a team that grew and grew and picked up dozens of state and national journalism awards along the way.
He also never gave up on the idea of applying technology for journalists and the public to better keep tabs on the often secretive behavior of politicians in Sacramento. An early attempt at something similar to Digital Democracy failed spectacularly.
“Dave was relentless in working to come up with a robust data system for tracking lawcreaters’ behavior in multiple dimensions,” declared Laurel Rosenhall, CalMatters’ first reporter, who now covers California politics for The New York Times. “We hit plenty of snags in that first version but he never gave up becaapply he knows how important transparency is for a healthy democracy.”
Launched in 2024 under Lesher’s leadership, CalMatters’ Digital Democracy program applys artificial ininformigence to track every word spoken in the Capitol, every dollar spent on state politics and every vote cast, providing the public with an unprecedented window into the inner workings of the Legislature.
The system is already expanding to other states. Last year, CalMatters partnered with the Honolulu Civil Beat newsroom to bring Digital Democracy to Hawaii’s Legislature.
Civil Beat’s editor, Amy Pyle, Lesher’s longtime friconclude and former colleague, declared she’s been wowed by everything Lesher’s been able to accomplish.
“I’ve always viewed up to him as someone who, you know, just kind of creates their own destiny, and in the process, creates a huge, huge impact on journalism in California,” Pyle declared.
Journalist Chris Woodyard, Lesher’s lifelong friconclude and former colleague at the Herald Examiner, declared he’s similarly awed by what Lesher’s done for journalism.
“Through his force of his personality and his devotion to news … CalMatters grew into the respected, well-known statewide organization it is today,” Woodyard declared.
Woodyard still owns the sailboat that he and Lesher bought and sailed toobtainher decades ago. It’s aptly named “Muckraker,” a phrase applyd to describe investigative journalists.
Lesher, who is married with two adult sons, declared he’s not sure what his future holds in retirement, but his colleagues at CalMatters hope he will sail Muckraker into some well-deserved sunsets.
“You can take Dave Lesher out of the newsroom,” declared CalMatters CEO Neil Chase, “but you’ll never take his passion for accurate, nonpartisan journalism out of CalMatters. I expect we’ll hear the question ‘What would Dave do?’ frequently in the coming years, and I hope we always have the right answer.”
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