Providing on-the-ground local news reporting and filling the geographic and topical gaps left by contracting legacy media companies. You can find many of these stories about Bay Area news, arts and culture, demographic trends, the environment, housing, equity and history at LocalNewsMatters.org. In 2019, we put additional resources into Contra Costa County and Martinez when that city’s local paper closed and we have similarly expanded into San Joaquin, Monterey, Santa Cruz and Mendocino 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. In 2025, a grant from the Marin Community Foundation helped us do more local reporting and share it with other news outlets to bolster the ecosystem.

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 University, 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 also cross-publish local work from India Currents, San Jose Spotlight, The Berkeley Scanner, SF Senior Beat and California Local to amplify good journalism. We welcome inquiries from philanthropic partners to do collaborative work in the months ahead as we navigate longterm impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and explore critical regional 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 collaborate with technologists and entrepreneurs to innovate and experiment.

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, Northwestern University 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, the Connemara Fund and others are helping to “turbocharge” this program by giving substantive mentoring to these interns.