Bay City News Foundation was started as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to bring coverage of the people, places and issues that deserve more attention to Bay Area readers like you. Our journalists work around the clock to bring vital information about the region to its residents, filling the gaps left by declining legacy companies and collaborating with others to provide trustworthy information at our free site, LocalNewsMatters.org.
Help us celebrate Three Years by making a donation today. Please consider giving $30 once -- or every month as a sustaining gift. Or, if you can give a substantial one-time gift of $300 or a Leadership Level gift of $3,000, we will be able to meet our 2021 fundraising goal and build our public service base.
Thank you for helping us hit our fundraising target of $350,000 for 2021.
202,288
Raised so far
By The Numbers
Bay City News Service has been serving the Bay Area media ecosystem since 1979 with reports on civic government, courts and breaking news. To round out that coverage with public service journalism about the people, places and issues that deserve more attention, Katherine Ann Rowlands established Bay City News Foundation in 2018. Since then, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit has hit some significant milestones:
50
Reporters & Editors
21
Paid Interns Over 3 Years
8
Board Members
6,090+
Stories
150+
Weekly Newsletters
114K
Unique Monthly Users
10
Partners
Our Mission
Bay City News Foundation serves the San Francisco Bay Area and is backed by charitable donations from contributors who care about local news, a free press, democratic values and an informed citizenry. We target geographic and topical news deserts. We collaborate with other media. We experiment with technology. We work with journalism schools to train the next generation of reporters. Help us do more with a donation today.
Individual and institutional donors help us with projects aimed at:
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 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.
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, SF Senior Beat, CALmatters, The Conversation, USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, Catchlight, PolicyLink, Renaissance Journalism, ProPublica Local and others to amplify good and important work. We welcome inquiries from philanthropic partners to do collaborative work in the months ahead as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic and explore issues such as 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, including Project Facet, Coral, Agenda Watch and others, to test new AI, distribution and audience engagement 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 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 a match from the Arjay and Frances Miller Foundation are helping to “turbocharge” this program by giving substantive mentoring to these interns.