The help-wanted ad requires the news reporter to make appearances for KPBS community-building events and other public relations activities.

With the Union-Tribune in full attrition, having bid adieu to its mainstay business columnist Dan McSwain, San Diego’s nonprofit news sector is picking up the slack, but at the price of blurring the traditional line between news gathering and flackery.

Per a help-wanted advertisement on LinkedIn for a new reporter by San Diego State University’s KPBS public broadcasting operation, “The Reporter is expected to participate in station on-air fundraising activities, and make appearances for KPBS community-building events and other public relations activities.” Adds the notice, “KPBS news stories involve taking complex concepts and rendering them into accessible and compelling stories. These stories will be carefully grounded in fact, but can still be playful or moving as the subject matter requires.” Starting pay is $23.08 per hour.

SoccerCity, the controversial proposal to privatize the former Qualcomm Stadium for commercial sports and residential development, continues to be the issue that keeps on paying off for local influence-peddlers.

The law firm of Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis recently began working for Public Land, Public Vote, the political action committee funded by Mission Valley landowners Sudberry Development and H.G. Fenton, opposed to the proposal, according to a September 15 disclosure filing.

Newly perched on the other side of the question is lobbyist Rachel Laing, a former Twitter handler for Republican mayor Jerry Sanders, who the same day filed a report saying she’d been hired by FS Investors, the group of La Jolla hedge-fund mavens promoting the project.