By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2011
In early April 2011, California Watch — the state-focused project of the Center for Investigative Reporting — released the first installment of “On Shaky Ground,” a three-part, 19-month investigation into seismic safety at California public schools. The findings were substantial: state regulators had failed to enforce the Field Act for decades, leaving thousands of school buildings potentially unsafe in a major earthquake. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Richard Horgan, tracked the investigation as one of the most substantial post-2010 California-investigative-journalism projects.
Then
The Center for Investigative Reporting had been founded in 1977 — one of the oldest nonprofit-investigative-journalism operations in the United States. California Watch had been launched in 2009-2010 as CIR’s California-focused project, building out the nonprofit-investigative-California-statewide model that the original 2011 Huffington Post Investigative Fund and other parallel post-2008 experiments were also developing.
Mark Katches was California Watch’s editorial director at the time of the April 2011 launch; Corey Johnson was one of the lead reporters on the seismic-safety investigation. The 19-month reporting effort that produced “On Shaky Ground” was substantively the kind of long-arc investigative project that the broader nonprofit-investigative funding model was specifically designed to support — too expensive for typical California daily-newspaper budgets, too systematic for shorter-cycle alt-press investigation.
The Field Act — California’s 1933 seismic-safety law passed after the Long Beach earthquake — had been the central regulatory framework that the investigation found state regulators had been systematically failing to enforce. The cumulative pattern documented in the investigation included thousands of school construction projects approved without proper inspection, buildings that had been operating for decades without verified seismic compliance, and an institutional culture inside the Division of the State Architect that had been substantively deficient.
Richard Horgan’s FishbowlLA framing was admiring. The piece celebrated the investigation as substantive accountability journalism operating at a scale that California’s daily newspapers had been increasingly unable to sustain.
Now
The California Watch “On Shaky Ground” investigation produced substantial subsequent legislative-and-regulatory action. The findings were used in California legislative hearings; the Division of the State Architect underwent substantial subsequent reform; school-district seismic-retrofit programs across the state were substantially accelerated in the years that followed. The investigation has continued to be cited as one of the most successful examples of nonprofit-investigative work producing meaningful policy outcomes.
The Center for Investigative Reporting has continued operating across the years since. CIR’s broader investigative output has expanded substantially; its Reveal podcast (launched in 2015 with PRX) has been one of the most-cited investigative-journalism podcasts of the post-2015 audio era. California Watch was eventually integrated into the broader CIR editorial structure as the state-watch model was reorganized.
Mark Katches went on to senior editorial roles at multiple subsequent organizations. Corey Johnson has continued in investigative journalism; his subsequent work at the Tampa Bay Times and other outlets has continued to produce significant accountability journalism across multiple state-and-national contexts.
The broader category of nonprofit-investigative state-watch projects has substantially expanded across the post-2011 interval. The Texas Tribune, the LA Public Press, ProPublica’s state-affiliate program, and many other operations have built out the model the early-2010s California Watch experiments helped pioneer.
The 2011 piece reads now as one of the documented moments when California’s nonprofit-investigative ecosystem was substantively building out the kind of long-arc, structural-failure-documenting investigative work that the contracting daily-newspaper press was structurally less able to produce. “On Shaky Ground” has aged into being one of the recurring reference examples of how nonprofit-investigative work can produce meaningful policy-and-regulatory outcomes.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.