Bay City News Foundation provides 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.
Thanks to you -- our generous readers and contributors -- we have hit our year-end fundraising goals every year since we started in 2018. And now, we are poised for growth in 2025 with new readers in an expanded, 13-county geographic territory in Northern California; new initiatives with photography and podcasting; and more content around aging and longevity, underserved communities, and books. We are also building on successful experiments using AI for better elections reporting in 2024 and creative uses of technology with cartooning, photography and audio products. We are building a news ecosystem that can amplify local reporting to reach more people every day. Donate if you want to see more reporting that strengthens local communities and our democracy and tell your networks about our free site: LocalNewsMatters.org. Thank you!
Thank you for helping us meet our $450,000 budget in 2024. We're on a roll thanks to our supporters.
500,000
Goal for 2025
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, we established Bay City News Foundation in 2018. Since then, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit has hit some significant milestones:
55
Reporters, Photographers & Editors
48
Paid Interns Over 5 Years
11
Board Members
10,000+
Original Stories/Year
116+
News and Culture Newsletters/Year
114K
Unique Monthly Users
50
Distribution Partners
Our Mission
Bay City News Foundation serves the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California 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, 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 the months ahead as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic 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.