Digging Deeper with Bay Area Journalism to Inform Our Community

Bay City News Foundation is turning three!

We have always done a good job of covering breaking and civic news in the Bay Area, stretching back to the 1979 start of the Bay City News Service wire, which sends original, local news to most other media in the region. And in 2018, when I founded the affiliated Bay City News Foundation, we started doing more arts and culture, demographic and environmental coverage thanks to grants and individual donors who support the nonprofit. But we’ve also heard from readers that they appreciate deeper, impactful reporting so we have put resources into special projects that provide context, explore trends and uncover information that can make a difference to our communities.

The reason for doing this broad range of work is based on our belief that a free and independent press is crucial to upholding democracy. Local news can play an important role in bringing injustice to light and speaking truth to power. It is the most actionable. It is where people can make the biggest difference in their communities once they have the information.

A few of our recent projects include:

• a detailed look at the financial challenges of getting clean water to rural areas, a series supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and written by Kiley Russell;
• an investigation into poor oversight of contracting work at public agencies like PG&E, a collaborative effort with ProPublica Local that was reported by Scott Morris;
• data-backed stories about trends and a series looking at equity and the uneven distribution of resources to different segments of the Bay Area population. Funded by the San Francisco Foundation and done with a team of journalists who have been trained by Microsoft News in data visualization work, journalists doing this ongoing work include Keith Burbank, Astrid Casimire, Tony Hicks, Jana Kadah, Chloe Lee Rowlands and Kiley Russell;
• and, most recently, we published a series by John Glidden on police reform in the Bay Area, looking at how both old and new approaches have succeeded or failed in four cities: Oakland, San Francisco, Richmond and Vallejo.

You can get journalism like this sent to your inbox each week by signing up to be a newsletter subscriber. And if you are able to contribute to our nonprofit so we can do more special project work like this, please support us today with a tax-deductible donation at any level that feels right for you.

We are so grateful to supporters like you for showing your commitment to independent local journalism.

With gratitude,

Katherine Ann Rowlands

Founder and Executive Director, Bay City News Foundation