Local news is dying some places, but not in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO – It’s no secret that the business of local news is struggling. News deserts are growing across the country, and over half of the counties in the United States now have just one or no remaining news outlet.

But in San Francisco, local news is seeing a resurgence thanks to a willingness to experiment. Half-century-old neighborhood news organizations are becoming nonprofits. Others are banking on the help of deep-pocketed supporters. And as local news driven by advertising revenue declines, news sites are relying on subscriptions to fill in the gaps.

A city of roughly 800,000 residents, San Francisco now boasts 27 news organizations, ranging from hyperlocal nonprofits and radio stations to billionaire-backed outlets like the San Francisco Standard vying to become the city’s paper of record. Unusual for a major American city, San Francisco has about the same number of media outlets today as it did a decade ago.

“Virtually every type of news model out there exists in the Bay Area,” said Bill Nagel, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s largest newspaper. “It’s a hypercompetitive environment.”

There are a few reasons the region can support so much news. The technology industry has made the Bay Area one of the wealthiest places in the country, and that wealth supports local news through donations large and small. It is also a highly educated region, which typically correlates to paid news readership.

It helps, too, that there is lots of news to report on and read about in San Francisco, from local political stars including Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom to nudist good Samaritans, driverless car crashes and contentious local politics.

“San Francisco is rare, because many big cities in this country don’t really have the resources necessary to fund these things, whether it’s big companies to advertise in a for-profit paper, or wealthy individuals or foundations to fund nonprofit journalism,” said Evan Smith, a co-founder of the Texas Tribune and an adviser at the Emerson Collective, which helps nonprofit newsrooms find funding. “And there isn’t enough talent in a lot of places to actually stand one of these up and to operate it.”

While the longevity of new business models remains to be seen, they provide a much-needed alternative to online advertising, which has been absorbed by Silicon Valley tech giants like Google and Meta, whose headquarters are an hour’s drive to the south of San Francisco.

California newspapers have been hit especially hard. From 2019-23, online and print circulation for the Sunday editions of seven of the state’s largest newspapers declined 30%, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.

But circulation for the San Francisco Chronicle increased 18% over the same period. The paper currently has about 150,000 paying digital subscribers, Nagel said.

Not all of the city’s newspapers have fared as well. Circulation for the San Francisco Examiner, owned by real estate baron Clint Reilly, declined 40% from 2020-22, according to advertising data. And the head count of working journalists in the city has been declining for decades.

As for-profit news outlets owned by hedge funds and newspaper chains shrink, nonprofit newsrooms have grown in their place. The nonprofit model gives newsrooms access to a national network of grants from journalism foundations, and the ability for readers to make tax-deductible donations. The trade-off is they can’t make endorsements or be sold to a for-profit company.

Among them in San Francisco is Mission Local, which has been an independent newsroom since 2014 and is run by Lydia Chávez and Joe Eskenazi, two veterans of Bay Area media.

Operating from a 700-square-foot office in the city’s Mission District, Mission Local gets 75% of its revenue from reader donations, Chávez said. Its current staff of three editors and six reporters, along with five summer interns, is the largest it has ever been. Eskenazi compared the ethos of Mission Local to alt-weekly newspapers that used to thrive in San Francisco but have mostly disappeared.

“It wasn’t the journalistic model that led to the demise of alt-weeklies, it was the advertising model,” Eskenazi said. The nonprofit model “better allows for readers and donors to support us.”

Other local outlets are trying to emulate that success. The San Francisco Bay View, a historically Black newspaper, reincorporated as a nonprofit in May, said Kevin Epps, its executive editor.

The change marked a stark departure for the Bay View, which has relied on advertising since its founding in 1976, back when Epps delivered its copies as a 10-year-old paper carrier.

“San Francisco is an epicenter of alternative media, and I think that’s sort of reflective of why the journalism here is still able to somewhat fare better than other places,” Epps said. “But we have to find other streams of revenue.”

A recent addition to the city’s media market is Gazetteer SF, an upstart only a few months old that has no social media accounts, actively delists its articles from Google search and markets itself via paper flyers stapled to telephone poles around the city.

Byron Perry, the founder of Gazetteer, said its goal is to reach 12,000 paid subscribers in the next two years, with each customer paying around $7 a month to receive articles mostly through email and text blasts.

As news outlets increasingly lean on donations and philanthropy, some residents worry that local power brokers are trying to use the media to shape local politics.

Since its inception in 2021, the Standard has been funded by Michael Moritz, a billionaire venture capitalist and former journalist.

Moritz’s outspoken criticism of city leadership has caused some rivals to question the Standard’s editorial independence. He has spent over $300 million on social and political causes in the city, and Standard CEO Griffin Gaffney was a former organizer at TogetherSF, a political action committee financed by Moritz that is politically moderate by San Francisco standards.

“Michael is very active in the community,” Gaffney said over email. “But his political activity and philanthropic work is separate from the Standard.”

The outlet has lured talented journalists with high pay – a recent job posting for a reporting position had a salary range of $110,000 to $170,000 – and its coverage of city politics is well regarded, including its investigations into campaign finance violations. The Standard also plans to roll out a new subscription service later this year, Gaffney said.

“We started the Standard because San Francisco deserves a top-notch publication,” he said. “And yet our one major publication is run by a lumbering media conglomerate based in New York,” he added, referring to Hearst, which owns the Chronicle.

Nagel said the Chronicle had been successfully run in San Francisco for the past 160 years. “In an era of news deserts, we welcome newcomers with the right intentions to the fray,” he said.

Other tech money has also flowed from PACs to independent journalists. Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a prominent local PAC, has donated at least $200,000 to independent journalists in recent years, according to financial filings and interviews. The PAC is also moderate by local standards.

It’s unclear if business models that work for news in San Francisco could be as successful elsewhere. Nonprofit newsrooms have found their footing everywhere from rural Mississippi to inner-city Chicago, and some even won Pulitzer Prizes this spring. But fundraising for nonprofits can vary from year to year, especially in less wealthy regions.

“It’s still a struggle,” Chávez said. “We worry about raising money every day.”

In Baltimore, the nonprofit Baltimore Banner has grown to rival the incumbent Baltimore Sun thanks to funding from Stewart Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate and philanthropist. But for outlets like the Banner and the Standard that rely heavily on the support of a single financier to get off the ground, longevity is a concern.

In 2010, billionaire Warren Hellman started a newspaper in San Francisco called the Bay Citizen, but it merged with another news organization in 2012 shortly after his death.

“It shows one of the hazards of what I call the ‘billionaire behind the curtain’ model,” said Jonathan Weber, a former editor-in-chief of the Bay Citizen and the first editor-in-chief of the Standard. “And it’s a big one.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.