About SF Public Press

Noncommercial, public-interest news for the San Francisco Bay Area

SF Public Press is a startup nonprofit news organization in San Francisco that aims to do for print and Web journalism what public broadcasting has done for radio and television.

We publish public-interest news reporting at www.sfpublicpress.org with the help of more than 70 professional and volunteer journalists and nonprofit specialists striving to fill the void of hard-hitting accountability reporting that’s been lost with the downsizing of the commercial press. We have received support from the San Francisco Foundation and more than 200 individual donors. In the summer of 2010 we also began producing a print newspaper edition in an effort to bridge the digital divide.

Our mission is to enrich civic life in San Francisco by delivering public-interest journalism to broad and diverse audiences through print and interactive media not supported by advertising.

Our goal is to create a sustainable, replicable noncommercial business model for delivering quality local journalism. Our nonprofit media business model incorporates entrepreneurial use of technology and traditional standards of journalism to provide better local news coverage to underserved audiences, and re-imagines the daily newspaper as a public-media institution accountable to the community.

We are also establishing content and distribution partnerships with an existing web of local independent and public media, aiming to enhance communication among the diverse neighborhoods, eth­nic groups and shared-interest communities throughout San Francisco.

The need: nation’s press in peril

Newspapers around the country are trapped in a cycle of falling advertising revenue, staff cutbacks and circulation loss. In the Bay Area, journalists are disappearing. Northern California newspapers have collectively downsized by more than 1,000 journalists since 2000. With fewer reporters scrambling to cover larger beats, newspapers are bound to compromise their watch­dog role and miss important stories. We are starting to feel the social consequences of this, including superficial and frag­mentary coverage of education, public health, the environment, business, labor, social trends, crime and politics.

Meanwhile, as some news organizations have proposed jettisoning their print editions, doing so could exacerbate the problem that access to the Internet is not universal: According to San Fran­cisco’s 2009 City Survey, more than 34 percent of households with income under $50,000 are not able to access the Internet at home via personal computers. (Median household income in San Francisco is $65,519.)

Our vision: expanding the definition of public media

SF Public Press is positioned to address these disturbing trends with an initiative to pro­duce the first truly noncommercial, general-interest daily Web-and-print publication. Long-term sustainability will hinge on a membership-subscription model, similar to those used by public radio, National Geographic and Consumer Reports. Our long-term financial modeling indicates we can generate more than two-thirds of our revenue from member-subscribers and individual newspaper sales, decreasing our dependence on grants and allowing us to pay staff and freelance contributors. 

Since March 2009, professional journalists working as volunteers and freelancers have been creating the original news content published on our Web site between two and five days a week. News Editor Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig, former city editor at The Oakland Tribune, oversees the editorial team.

Our reporters have covered a range of topics, including budget cuts at state colleges and universities, potential closure of local public-access television, restored federal funding for stem cell research, San Francisco’s efforts to make streets safer for cyclists, personal earthquake preparedness, threatened shuttering of the San Francisco Chronicle, and public response to the same-sex marriage debate and the ensuing legal battle. In December 2009 we published, in collaboration with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Bay Bridge Report, examining how the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has racked up $12 billion in costs.

In June, we launched our most ambitious project — the City Budget Watchdog beat — featuring in-depth coverage of San Francisco’s $438 million budget deficit. Few other news organizations focused consistently on which services were being cut and the real-life impact of those reductions. We partnered with Spot.us, a San Francisco-based journalism micro-funding project, to raise $5,000 from online contributors to pay the reporters doing this important work. In three months, our team produced 18 articles and 13 videos accompanied by photos and information graphics, and co-produced with KALW Public Radio a budget roundtable that aired Aug. 17 on the "Crosscurrents" news program. 

Commitment to community engagement

To encourage the broader community to participate in shaping local news coverage, SF Public Press launched SF Engage a citywide community engagement program blending face-to-face journalism outreach with new technology, with particular focus on neighborhoods and communities underserved by the commercial press. We are doing this to provide people with access to the information they need to make decisions in all aspects of their lives, and to encourage meaningful and substantive community conversation.