When the Clayton Pioneer folded last summer, this four-square-mile East Bay town of 11,000 became a news desert overnight. The outlet that moved fastest to fill the vacuum wasn't a newspaper at all — it was a registered political action committee that brands its website "Clayton's Most Trusted News Source."

Clayton Watch, co-founded by residents Gary Hood and former mayor Bill Walcutt, is simultaneously a source of local news and a campaign vehicle that supports and opposes candidates for office. That dual identity — covering a town's government while working to shape who runs it — has turned a small-city squabble into a case study of what fills the void when local journalism dies. It has already escalated into an unprecedented legal bid to make a county grand jury rewrite its findings about the city.

Clayton's newspaper, the Clayton Pioneer, closed last summer. What remains is the monthly Diablo Gazette and Clayton Watch — a website run by a recently formed PAC that supports and opposes candidates while publishing coverage of the government those candidates would run.

Clayton Watch did not set out to be a PAC. Hood and Walcutt began putting out flyers and ads against council candidates they viewed as a "boys' club," and their spending eventually crossed the $1,000 threshold at which the California Fair Political Practices Commission requires registration as a political action committee. Hood and Walcutt decided decades ago that they couldn't "let the city run rampant with budget and over-building," Hood told SFGATE. The Diablo Gazette independently reported the launch in August 2024, describing the two founders as "well known in the community for their conservative positions." Clayton Watch has since drawn more than 300,000 page views, and the FPPC told SFGATE that PACs are not prohibited from calling themselves a news source.

Hood frames the project as a defense of Clayton's character against more progressive neighbors. "We want Clayton to remain Clayton. We don't want to become San Francisco. We don't want to become Oakland," he told SFGATE. "It's a quiet town, small community. Don't bring that progressive agenda here." Asked what he meant, he cited taxes, homelessness, and, in his words, people who "want every house to have a Pride flag in their yard."

Critics see a political weapon dressed as a newsroom. "They claim to be a PAC," Tamara Steiner, the former owner of the shuttered Pioneer, told SFGATE, "but they're nothing more than playground bullies with word processors." Steiner, who says she closed the paper after becoming ill, argues Clayton Watch has stepped into the vacuum but "not in the way a newspaper should." She points to the officials it backs — among them Mayor Jeff Wan and Councilwoman Kim Trupiano, both up for reelection, and Planning Commissioner Maria Shulman. "Their candidates rely on them," she said. Not everyone objects: "It's almost a newspaper, informing people on the facts," Vice Mayor Richard Enea told SFGATE.

The clearest measure of how far Clayton Watch has pushed beyond conventional journalism is unfolding in Contra Costa County Superior Court. In June 2025, the county's Civil Grand Jury released Report 2505, "Clayton: Small City, Big Concerns," which the Diablo Gazette described as characterizing the City Council as grossly dysfunctional and operating near financial ruin. The Council rejected nearly all of it. Clayton Watch went further: the Gazette reported that the PAC filed a 56-page petition, date-stamped Oct. 23, asking the court to amend the public record — an action the paper noted has no clear precedent, since the jurors are shielded by anonymity and the panel that wrote the report has since been replaced. Per the Gazette, the petition argues the jury relied on unaudited financial figures, overstated staff turnover by counting interim appointments, and itself violated Penal Code 933(f) by not sharing the report with the Council before publication.

That a group blurring the line between reporter and campaigner would try to compel a court to revise a watchdog's findings is the sharpest illustration yet of the terrain Clayton now occupies. Clayton Watch styles its work as transparency and accountability. Its detractors call it the capture of the town's only remaining megaphone by two men with a slate to elect. Both readings can be true at once — which is precisely the problem when the entity reporting the news is also, in effect, on the other side of the ballot.