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 and history at LocalNewsMatters.org. In January, we started putting additional resources into covering Contra Costa County and Martinez when that city’s local paper closed.

Building partnerships with other media and nonprofit groups to do journalism projects. We have been working with Solutions Journalism Network, 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.

Testing new technology to gather and distribute news in the ways consumers want to get it. We are collaborating with entrepreneurs from the JSK Journalism Fellowship program at Stanford University, including Project Facet, to test new distribution 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 are working with San Francisco State, San Jose State, UC Berkeley, Newsroom by the Bay at Stanford 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 is helping to “turbocharge” this program by giving substantive mentoring to these interns.