Providing on-the-ground local news reporting and filling the geographic and topical gaps left by contracting legacy media companies in the region. You can find many of these stories about Bay Area news, arts and culture, demographic trends, the environment, equity and history at LocalNewsMatters.org. In 2019, we started putting additional resources into covering Contra Costa County and Martinez when that city’s local paper closed and we have also expanded into San Joaquin, Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. We now serve 12 counties. In 2022, with help from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, we expanded partnerships with independent and ethnic media outlets to better serve local audiences with important and community-based news.

Building partnerships with other media and nonprofit groups to do journalism projects. We have been working with Solutions Journalism Network, Big Local News at Stanford, SF Senior Beat, CALmatters, EdSource, The Conversation, USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, Catchlight, PolicyLink, Renaissance Journalism, ProPublica Local, Report for America and others to amplify good and important work. We welcome inquiries from philanthropic partners to do collaborative work in urban and rural areas, and explore issues such as aging, housing, health care, education, transportation, the environment, and arts and culture.

Testing new technology to gather and distribute news in the ways consumers want to get it. We have collaborated with entrepreneurs from the JSK Journalism Fellowship program at Stanford University, Project Facet, Coral, Agenda Watch, Bloom, Starling Lab and others to test new AI, distribution, mapping, audience engagement and photo authentication products. We are partnering with Newspack to use the WordPress publishing platform for local websites. We are working with Microsoft to modernize our internal story assignment, creation and editing workflows. We are open to experimentation.

Supporting the next generation of journalists with internships and training. We work with San Francisco State, San Jose State, Cal State East Bay, UC Berkeley, Newsroom by the Bay at Stanford University, the Rebele Internship Program, the Emma Bowen Foundation, Dow Jones, CUNY and others to train and mentor students so they have a professional path toward journalism jobs. A generous seed donation from the Hogan-Newton Fund at the Miami Foundation and additional support from the Arjay and Frances Miller Foundation are helping to “turbocharge” this program by giving substantive mentoring to these interns.