About the San Francisco Public Press

Noncommercial, public-interest news for the Bay Area

The San Francisco Public Press is a startup nonprofit news organization 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 sfpublicpress.org and in a quarterly print newspaper that we sell for $1 in more than 5o retail locations. We produce our own in-depth news reporting and curate stories from more than 30 local nonprofit news and civic-affairs partners.

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.

How we do it

Our stories come from dozens of professional journalists and operations volunteers, who believe in the vision of filling 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, numerous other institutional funders and more than 200 individual donors. In the summer of 2010 we also began producing a quartery print newspaper edition in an effort to bridge the digital divide.

We believe in the nonprofit media business model as a means to provide better local news coverage to underserved audiences. We seek to re-imagine the daily newspaper as a public-media institution accountable to the community.

We have established content and distribution partnerships with an existing web of more than 30 local independent and public media, to enhance communication among the diverse neighborhoods, eth­nic groups and shared-interest communities throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area.

The 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.)

Expanding the definition of public media

The San Francisco Public Press is the first truly noncommercial, general-interest daily Web-and-print publication. Long-term sustainability hinges on a membership-subscription model, similar to those used by public radio, National Geographic and Consumer Reports. Our long-term financial modeling (see: Three-phase budget plan for building a daily newspaper) 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. (see also: Strategic Plan 2009-2011 — PDF)

Professional freelancers journalists produce original news reporting on the website and in print every three months. News Editor Richard Pestorich, former an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, oversees the editorial team.