Ten teenagers from Santa Rosa, California-based Community Action Partners explore the impact of the national economic crisis on our local communities.  These young "citizen journalists" explore a wide range of topics such as housing, food, and unemployment, and meet many individuals facing these unprecedented challenges.

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With difficulty, Sonoma State has weathered a 17% budget reduction this semester. Now they’re waiting to see how much more they will have to cut in the months ahead.

Looking ahead to the next academic year, SSU CFO and Vice president for Administration and Finance, Laurence Furukawa-Schlereth (right) , offered a silver lining of sorts, telling the campus community assembled at the midday Town Hall meeting that he hoped to avoid any further job losses in 2010-11.

Former Dean of the school of Social Services at Sonoma State, Bob Karlsrud, questions the no layoffs pledge, because it does not cover the part-time lecturers who teach the majority of courses offered at the university. Because they are rehired each year, it’s not considered a job loss when a new contract is not offered for the next semester. Karlsrud contends the campus has added too many contractual administrative positions, at the expense of keeping teachers in classrooms.

Catherine Nelson, a political science professor who represents the Sonoma campus on the statewide CSU Academic Senate, believes the current fiscal crisis also represents an opportunity for the school to clarify and redefine its core vision of itself, something she says is not yet happening here or anywhere else. But she has an idea of what it could include.

The next Town Hall meeting at the university will focus on the troubled Sonoma State University Foundation on December 16^th.

The 2010 edition of Project Censored’s annual list of important but undercovered news stories is out as usual, while behind the scenes, there’s been a changing of the guard.

One measure of the growth that Project Censored has experienced over the past 33 years, Frymer offers, is the huge increase in the number of stories that are now being nominated for their consideration each year. So even the list of finalists is longer now.

It’s always hard to pick a favorite, but new Project Censored Director Ben Frymer (left) admits to a particular fondness for one of the current top 25 stories, in part because it came from an atypical source.

 In fact, he couldn’t pick just one. Frymer has some other favorites from the list, too.

You can see all 25 of this year's top stories on the Project Censored website, as well as review the lists from past years.

The book release party for the 2010 Project Censored publication will be held at the Santa Rosa Oddfellows Hall on Saturday, Dec. 5, beginning at 6 pm. see full details here.

Amazon.com gets an unfair edge in the retail world by not charging California customers sales tax, the company’s critics contend. And there’s a move afoot in the state legislature (AB 178)  to change that.

Under California’s tax code, notes Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Alameda), online sales tax is legally required to be paid at the time of purchase, if not directly to the vendor, who passes it on to the Board of Equalization, then on the purchasers personal state income tax return.

As a book seller,  Bill Petrocelli, co-founder and vice president of Book Passage,  has been at odds with Amazon ever since the online vendor arrived on the scene. But as Amazon has expanded, he says, other conventional retailers have begun to “share his pain.”

While the giants of the online sales world, such as Amazon, are the most visible targets of AB 178, an organization of smaller retailers has banded together as the Performance Marketing Alliance, one of several groups that is aggressively lining up to fight the measure.