ABOUT BAY CITY NEWS FOUNDATION
Bay City News Foundation is a mission-driven 501c3 that is the backbone of the region’s news ecosystem, encompassing 13 counties in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California.
With its network of partners, BCNF serves as many as 10 million people by empowering communities and newsrooms from Mendocino to Marin to Monterey. We address news deserts, experiment with the latest techniques and technologies, embrace partnerships, and foster the next generation of journalists. Through these pillars, we strengthen local democracy by ensuring all communities have access to reliable, high-quality local news.
In addition to our main public-facing newsletters and website at LocalNewsMatters.org, BCNF has pursued partnership projects in Marin, Mendocino, Stockton and the South Bay. The nonprofit foundation is able to add reporting strength to local communities, serve as a fiscal agent for other outlets, and even manage newsrooms and collaborative projects with data, content sharing and new platforms. Our distribution arm, the affiliated Bay City News Service, is set up to deliver 24/7 news to dozens of broadcast, print and digital outlets across the region, greatly amplifying the impact of our original journalism.
BAY CITY NEWS FOUNDATION SUPPORTS
Local News Matters is a nonprofit news site bringing community coverage to the San Francisco Bay Area region so that the people, places and topics that deserve more attention get it. We regularly cover stories about local events, politics, arts and culture, volunteers and nonprofits, equity and demographics, science and the environment, history, and youth voices. Our footprint includes the following counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma. We also cover regional stories in the Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.
The Mendocino Voice was started in 2016 to provide coverage of the county’s key stories- including breaking coverage of events as they happen, in-depth coverage of county issues, and stories highlighting the life and culture of the Mendocino area. As of June 2024, the Mendocino Voice is now part of the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation. Our nonprofit newsroom has full time staff and a large cohort of freelancers, as well as a Mendocino-specific team based in the county itself.
As the backbone of the news ecosystem in the greater Bay Area, every story we publish on our nonprofit news site, Local News Matters, is amplified many times daily by most significant TV, radio, print and digital outlets in the 13-county region via our affiliate newswire, Bay City News Service. We are often the primary source of verified, timely reporting to separate fact from rumor, truth from misinformation, verified news from disinformation on the most important stories. Learn more about our products and services.
The Women Do News project grew out of a 2019 cohort of journalists participating in Take The Lead, a leadership training program co-founded by Gloria Feldt. It has since evolved to partner with other allies at universities and journalism groups to identify worthy women journalists for biographies, train editors, and add Wikipedia entries to even the playing field on this important platform. Women Do News is part of Bay City News Foundation which supports this work.
The Piedmont Exedra is a free, hyperlocal, independent news site created by a group of Piedmont citizens and launched in November 2018. It is fiscally sponsored by Bay City News Foundation.
The Berkeley Scanner is a nationally-recognized independent daily news outlet focused on crime and public safety reporting in Berkeley, California. The Scanner provides daily news and in-depth coverage about crime and safety so you and your neighbors are informed, engaged and empowered about critical issues in your daily lives.
California Local is your virtual home for daily local news, community resources and connection to the people and groups making a positive impact in your community.
The Contra Costa Youth Journalism (CCYJ) initiative empowers students from underserved Contra Costa County high schools to write and share stories about their schools and communities. Students learn journalism fundamentals and ethical practices from industry experts and gain the opportunity to build their writing portfolios with professionally published work on CCSpin and LocalNewsMatters.org, which is hosted and funded by Bay City News Foundation.
Mosaic’s mission is to inspire a passion for journalism, to expand opportunities for underserved high school students, to teach journalism skills, critical thinking and media literacy, and to enhance the cultural diversity of the American news media. Bay City News Foundation is the fiscal sponsor of Mosaic Journalism.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Katherine Ann Rowlands
Board Member, Executive Director
Katherine Ann Rowlands is president of Bay City News Service, executive director of Bay City News Foundation and editorial director of LocalNewsMatters.org. She has worked as a journalist for 40 years, covering news in the Bay Area, Central California and overseas. As a 2017 JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, she focused her research on how to overcome gender disparities in newsrooms, especially in leadership positions, and how to bolster local news coverage in the Bay Area. In 2018, she bought Bay City News, a local news service that has been covering the 9-county San Francisco Bay Area since 1979, and expanded it to cover 13 counties. She also founded the nonprofit BCN Foundation to support public service journalism in the region. Kat is a past president of Journalism and Women Symposium, a national group that provides training, networking and mentoring for women in journalism. She was honored with an alumni award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1She is president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition. A Berkeley native, she got her start in journalism as a summer intern for Bay City News Service. Reach her at kat@baycitynews.com.
Rob Merker
Board Treasurer
Rob Merker had a successful career starting and operating two real estate-related businesses in New York City and has a strong background in finance. After retiring in 2012, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy with a specialization in ethics from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His dissertation was on ethical issues in philanthropy, and he currently teaches and speaks on ethical issues and philanthropy. An accomplished public speaker, he has taught at The University of California Berkeley in the OLLI program; Cal State University East Bay in Hayward; and Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY. Rob has served on numerous not-for-profit boards and also served as treasurer for non-profit organizations. He currently sits on the ethics committee of Kaiser Oakland hospital, and the committees for ethical treatment of human subjects at Cal Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley labs.
Ryan Nakashima
Board Secretary
Ryan Nakashima is director of product management and subscriptions at Hearst Newspapers. Previously, he was senior product manager of digital subscriptions at Media News Group. A JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2016-17, his product work and interest in pricing models for ad-free subscriptions was built on a career as a technology and media reporter at The Associated Press, where he worked for 13 years, most recently in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering Google. He also worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Japan Times and Agence-France Presse in Tokyo. After covering the movie and music industry’s transition from DVDs and CDs to streaming, he became more concerned that the newspaper industry was not turning the corner fast enough. He graduated with a bachelor in journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada where he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Charlatan.
James Chadwick
Board Chair
James Chadwick is a media and intellectual property attorney in the Bay Area. He has represented news media (print, broadcast, and online), authors, documentary film makers, and other content creators and distributors throughout his career. His work has included defending media clients in litigation and advising them on prepublication and prebroadcast risk mitigation, content licensing, and intellectual property matters. He has also specialized in pursuing litigation seeking access to government records and meetings. He is the recipient of multiple awards for his work in these areas, including the Norman S. Yaffe Career Achievement Award from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He received a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of California Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and a J.D. from Santa Clara University.
Peggy Northrop
Board Vice Chair
Peggy Northrop has had a long career as a media executive, communications consultant and board member. She worked at the San Francisco Examiner as an editor before making the switch to magazines and moving to New York City. There, she worked at a succession of women’s media brands before becoming editor-in-chief of More, and then Global Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest. She returned to California to run Sunset Publishing in 2013. During her tenure both Reader’s Digest and Sunset won National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, the first in their histories. She has since consulted on digital and print publishing projects for Airbnb, AARP and others, and acted as CEO and board member of the women’s leadership nonprofit Watermark (now Upward). She is currently advising Radivision, the streaming platform for the startup world, on content and communications strategy. She is a board member of Washington & Jefferson College in her hometown of Washington, PA, where she grew up in the news business as the daughter of a community newspaper publisher.
Madeleine Buckingham
Board Member
Madeleine Buckingham is currently the Center for Investigative Reporting’s chief financial officer. As the oldest and largest non-profit independent news organization in the country and founded in 1976, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is the parent organization of Mother Jones Magazine and the Reveal Podcast. CIR has won numerous awards over the years including winning a recent National Magazine Award as well as being named as finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, Madeleine was president and CEO and served as chief operating officer prior to that, winning the SF Business Times Most Influential Women in Business award during her tenure. She has spent more than 30 years in senior finance and management positions in the publishing and tech industries, working for a range of publishing companies and internet startups, including Sony Corp’s internet incubator and International Data Group. When Madeleine doesn’t have her head buried in a set of financials or isn’t trying to save non-profit journalism, you can most likely find her trail running, kayaking, traveling, listening to live music or immersed in a good history book.
Bill Drummond
Board Member
Bill Drummond is a longtime professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and has recently worked on prison journalism projects. His career includes stints at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem and later a Washington correspondent. Drummond was appointed a White House Fellow in 1976 by President Gerald R. Ford, worked briefly for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and eventually became associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1979 he joined NPR and became the founding editor of Morning Edition. He joined the Berkeley faculty in July, 1983. He has served two terms as Chair of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate. He is author of the book, “Prison Truth.”
Jareen Imam
Board Member
Board member Jareen Imam is a content creator, social media strategist, and digital marketer working in the tech industry in the New York City area. She was recently a senior content and editorial manager for Amazon Ads, working cross-functionally with teams in social, marketing, events, product, data, and design. Prior to joining Amazon, she worked in the media industry for 10 years as a people manager and journalist. She’s held global leadership positions at NBC, CBS News, and CNN. In her free time, she paints and films content about love, money, and careers. She’s also a published creative writer and poet.
Jenn Kho
Board Member
Jennifer Kho is former executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and past president of the Journalism and Women Symposium. Previously, she served as VP of journalism and information equity at DoGoodery, a consulting agency that ideates, creates and executes initiatives to improve lives and reduce inequity. She was also a senior adviser for Canary Media, an adviser for The Pivot Fund and an independent researcher. She co-authored a Membership Puzzle Project report on building news communities. She held leadership roles as the senior director of strategic innovation at HuffPost, where she led the development of new audience engagement, storytelling and revenue models, including membership; managing editor for HuffPost; and managing editor for the Guardian US.
Alejandra Saragoza
Board Member
Alejandra Saragoza is a content creator and editorial manager in the Bay Area with experience in the publishing industry. She was recently the managing editor for Zendesk, spearheading the daily editorial operations for the award-winning SaaS company. Prior to that, she served as managing editor for California.com, spearheading the content strategy and daily editorial operations for the start-up media site that serves as a guide to living and traveling in California. She also worked as an editor for Diablo magazine, Healthline Media, and other tech companies. Her work has been published in The Huffington Post, Fast Company, Via, and Touring & Tasting. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in communication and minored in professional writing and editing. She also studied at Universidad Complutense de Madrid for one year and worked at an expat magazine.