Update 3/27/12 Bay Citizen announces the merger is official. 

The Bay Citizen was one of the most well-funded online news start-up projects and yet it seems unlikely to survive the death of its founder and financial supporter Warren Hellman. Last week, the Citizen announced an intent to agree to merge with the Center for Investigative Reporting under the direction of former San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. While the Bay Citizen has a content distribution agreement with the New York Times for providing exclusive Bay Area content, and reported still having 17 million dollars in the bank (an amount most online news startups can only imagine), the project had lost its entire senior management staff in a few months and was apparently burning through cash at an unsustainable rate. Reports are that managers were being paid between $300,000 and $500,000 a year, which are to say the least unusually high salaries for nonprofit startup projects. A small editorial unit at the Citizen negotiated a Media Workers Guild contract late in 2011, but it is unclear whether that agreement would be maintained after the merger.

On the other side of the fence, the Center for Investigative Reporting, which seems to be coming out as the lead organization in the combined entity under Bronstein , reported a fraction of the financial resources of the citizen with about 4 million in revenue.

A presentation to the Bay Citizen's board outlined "the largest investigative reporting team in the Bay Area", a focus on entrepreneurial journalism that seemed to suggest trying to develop a paying clientele for bith investigative stories and various techno-platforms to be developed.

While it is a bit early to make any definitive statements about what this all might mean here is a link to a Your Call program on 2-10-2012 that tried:

(With Tracy Rosenberg, Media Alliance and Jon Funabiki, Rennaissance Journalism Center and Robert Rosenthal, CIR.