The rise, fall and future of a media empire: McClatchy and the Sacramento Bee have a 161-year legacy in Sacramento. As the newspaper industry struggles nationally, executives say investments in virtual and augmented reality will see the business thrive once again.

The Sacramento Bee imposed its latest round of layoffs and company buyouts on Tuesday, targeting 15 editorial staffers and eight working on the production and copy desk. 

In a way, not much has changed.

At the Golden 1 Center, Sacramento Kings fans continue to wave cowbells at games, having long since embraced the once-insulting apparatus. The grub still costs a pretty penny. The team remains perpetually in a building year.

It is impossible to know what West Sacramento would look like without its most prominent advocate, Mayor Christopher Cabaldon. And it’s impossible to understand the mayor without understanding the tragic accident that drove him towards success. 

After losing an undisclosed sum both years, TBD Fest (otherwise known as The Bridge District Festival) has incurred blame from investors and rival music promoters for being underfunded. General consensus is that if a festival can’t pay for its talent before selling a single ticket, it’s under-capitalized.

If you imagine a humming city as a living body, the conventional alleyway might be the large intestine. It’s a lonely grey loading zone, a collection point for garbage, and a covert space for drug use and violence. But as U.S. cities grow denser, urban passageways that were once ignored and crumbling are enjoying a renaissance. Alleyway activation is a designer buzzword for modernizing utilitarian corridors into well-lit public spaces.

The City of West Sacramento has started using mapping software to locate homeless camps as a way to monitor the local homeless population and direct them to public assistance.

Actual experts of business creation express concern that media’s flashy portrayal of handsome entrepreneurs, disruptive products and instant investment glosses over the unglamorous learning process vital to any new business.

Nehemiah Corp., a social enterprise nonprofit that has spent two decades developing programs that help low-income people afford homes, is winding down most of its operations, the company has announced.

With each interview I conducted and report I filed, I sought to understand how these great rolling machines had destroyed the person I used to be and killed the person I cared about most. But publishing stories about high-speed rail never helped. Like other pain relievers, print journalism became one more way to avoid facing what happened that day.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority replaced an engineer with a political operative to lead the nation’s biggest public works project. Jeff Morales instantly charmed his opponents but made technical decisions that placed high-speed rail at the mercy of the courts. Can Morales save his runaway train?

The town of Rio Vista has lost gas production, lost weekend crowds of boaters and windsurfers and lost flagship hotels and Delta shoreline restaurants. But more importantly, its people have lost the notion that prosperity returns to those who stick to the status quo and wait it out. 

For much of the past decade, venture capitalists showered dollars upon clean-technology startups with promising-sounding ideas in areas like solar, electric cars and biofuels.

That era appears to have ended.

As Obamacare begins to take effect in hospitals across the country, it’s becoming clear that the new financial model for Medicare is the polar opposite of a government takeover.

For nearly two decades, local city officials have envisioned a streetcar that would transport residents and visitors across downtown Sacramento. 

It was the last farmer’s market of the season, and the photo-op recalled The Last Supper. Standing in Cesar Chavez Plaza, Mayor Kevin Johnson spread his arms behind two tables piled high with fresh fruits and vegetables. And with scores of white-aproned restaurateurs to his right and left, he unveiled a logo promoting Sacramento as an agronomical Eden.

It isn’t the official start for a gubernatorial run, but Getta Clue apparel store at the Downtown Plaza mall reports to have sold several hundred ‘Kevin For Governor’, ‘Thank You KJ’ and other unauthorized Kings celebration t-shirts for $20 apiece.

Chris Forsyth has a ritual: every time he finishes working on a campaign, he treats himself to a new tattoo. Having worked in the state Capitol for nearly 20 years, the heavily painted chief of staff to Senator Jim Beall (D-San Jose) estimates that about 15 percent of state lawmakers have at least one tattoo.

It’s lunchtime at Fred T. Korematsu Elementary in Davis. A cafeteria monitor stands over the first, second and third graders, but she is only a scarecrow.

After more than a decade of work and a price tag that has grown by 50 percent, representatives for Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento report that the $750 million midtown hospital upgrade is in the final phases and is expected to be finished by mid-2014.

“Something isn’t quite right with Tim Collom. On the outside, Collom is doing far better than most of us. In the past year, he has been featured on KCRA-TV and HGTV speaking about real estate and in the pages of The Sacramento Bee and Sacramento Magazine showcasing his paintings. 

At first it sounds like backwards thinking: revitalize a downtown area by adding miniature plots of farmland on city blocks.

The boss must be crazy. 

It may be the riskiest and most difficult conversation to bring up at work, but what other option does an employee have when a manager becomes abusive, disturbed, withdrawn or otherwise damages the workplace?

Leave? That may be an option, or it may not be. The same goes for visiting the human relations department. If H.R. can’t — or won’t — fix the problem, here are some tips on how to address your boss’ behavior and keep your job. 

A few years ago, Troy Underwood noticed a problem with one of his accountants. The man’s work performance and personal appearance had deteriorated, he talked constantly on the phone with his children and agonized about his domestic life. 

City dwellers driving past the expansive cotton fields and scattered farmhouses along Highway 43 to Corcoran might get the feeling they’ve left California. A haze of dust, bugs and little particles of cow dung blanket the road between Fresno and Bakersfield. Even on a nice day, wiping debris from a car windshield begins to feel futile.

Stand outside Sandra Dee’s long enough on a Sunday, and you’ll see groups of hungry guests walk up and squawk at the realization that the famed soul food restaurant is closed.

In September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the municipal bond market froze, Sacramento International Airport had just begun constructing the biggest capital improvement project in the county’s history.

The ports of West Sacramento and Stockton are betting that a $30 million public investment in new infrastructure will convince local importers and exporters to transfer their method of goods movement to the San Francisco Bay from trucking to barge shipping.

There is a squad of clean air cops in Sacramento with a strong-arm approach that squashes the stereotype that environmentalists are wimps. These officials make up the enforcement branch of the California Air Resources Board, and they face off against truckers still fuming over
emission-control rules they fear will put them out of business.

Sitting in traffic can be stressful for anyone in a hurry, but the damage to the body and psyche can disproportionately hit low-income people, who are prone to encounter a greater range of destructive agents in their lives, experts say.

There are roads that the director of San Joaquin County’s transportation-planning agency forbids his teenage daughter from driving on.

On a sweltering day in mid-June, more than 100 newly minted teachers assembled for graduation at The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure would raise sales taxes by one-quarter of a percent for four years and increase taxes on incomes of $250,000 or higher by 1 to 3 percentage points for seven years.

On a morning in April, eight representatives of local banks and credit unions walked into the Sacramento Metro Chamber headquarters to discuss the region’s lousy credit situation.

The past few years have seen the biggest social upheaval against the banking industry in this nation’s history, and Capitol Hill lawmakers responded with 848 pages of legislation that liberal critics deride as weak and many conservatives call a job killer.

Both invasive and minimally invasive procedures carry significant risks of complication, so its important to research physicians and find out whether they are licensed in the surgeries they perform.

There was a raucous debate on the political stage last year over whether California companies were giving up on the Golden State and moving to Texas.

Last fall, for the first time in his life, Nicolas Ridout, 58, removed his shirt in front of strangers and went for a swim. This was not the first time a t-shirt had marked a personal milestone.

The Federal Reserve calls it Operation Twist, named after the 1961 Chubby Checker hit that sparked gyrating hips in dance halls across America. That was also the first year the Fed embarked on a mission to purchase long-term Treasury notes in an effort to drive down interest rates on long-term loans.

Monica Gonzalez recently logged onto the Facebook page of Weave Inc., an organization that treats survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, to post a simple message about how the nonprofit helped her overcome a nightmarish ordeal.

“I arrived in the City of Saloons,” wrote Mark Twain upon arriving here in 1866. “You can shut your eyes and march into the first door you come to and call for a drink, and the chances are that you will get it.”