Xconomy San Diego’s First Year Anniversary Brings the Benefits of Hindsight on the Local Innovation News with the Biggest Global Impact

Those of us who are lucky enough to work as journalists (and who get to write the first draft of history) often remember the dates when the important and even not-so-important events went down. After 30 years in the news business, it’s become almost second nature for me. Today marks a special day, both personally and professionally, because it’s been exactly one year since we officially launched Xconomy’s San Diego website.

My Xconomy debut began with “San Diego 92037,” a curtain-raiser that sought to explain why the prestigious La Jolla zip code that encompasses Torrey Pines Mesa represents the epicenter of technology innovation here—and it’s been more-or-less non-stop ever since. In the past year, we’ve published close to 1,415 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy.

With the launch of our San Diego website last year, Xconomy founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi wrote: “Smart, in-depth local coverage of an innovation community is, we think, central to the health and vitality of that community. But we also believe that good local stories—the ones we aim to tell in each of the three cities we now cover—can yield important insights into national and global trends.” Bob likes to say that the focus of our coverage is on local stories that have a global impact.

Hindsight isn’t always 20-20, but looking back over the past year certainly can add some perspective to the stories where the impact has become more apparent.

This week, for example, the Algal Biomass Association will convene in San Diego for its annual biomass summit at least partly because this region has become a global hub for algae-based research, technologies, and industries. For Xconomy readers, this became clear as we got an exclusive interview with the CEO of San Diego’s Sapphire Energy, charted the formation of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, and chronicled the partnership that San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics struck with ExxonMobil, which plans to spend $600 million to develop algae biofuels.

A few other stories from our first year also exemplify Xconomy’s mission of pursuing local stories with global impact:

—The ouster last week of Sequenom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SQNM]]) CEO Harry Stylli, along with several other top executives and employees, followed a five-month internal inquiry that has left

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.