Bay City News’ unconventional model to serve newsrooms and communities with Katherine Ann Rowlands (LNM Episode 47)

Katherine Ann Rowlands, owner and publisher of Bay City News, shares insights into the unique hybrid model of her organization, which has served the San Francisco Bay Area with round-the-clock news coverage for 45 years. She discusses Bay City News’ evolution from a pure newswire service into a dual operation that includes the nonprofit site Local News Matters. This hybrid structure helps provide essential coverage to underserved communities while meeting the needs of media and business clients and the general public. Rowlands highlights the challenges of balancing for-profit and nonprofit revenue streams to create a sustainable model that can be replicated in other regions.

Rowlands also addresses the importance of collaboration over competition in local journalism. With many news organizations competing for limited resources, she advocates for shared coverage efforts that can free up reporters to pursue more in-depth and investigative stories. She shares examples of Bay City News’ work that has impacted local policies.

The conversation touches on Rowlands’ commitment to supporting the next generation of journalists through paid internships and capacity-building efforts, while also advocating for greater gender diversity in media leadership. Rowlands explains how diversifying revenue and leveraging innovative tools like AI have positioned Bay City News to grow its impact and improve accessibility to critical local news across platforms.

Episode chapters:
(00:02:50) – History of Bay City News
(00:07:36) – The news service model
(00:14:42) – Collaboration and competition in local news
(00:16:52) – Launching Local News Matters, partnerships and expansion
(00:22:28) – Advice for replicating the Bay City News model in other regions
(00:29:48) – Impact of Bay City News on local reporting
(00:34:06) – Balancing client needs with community coverage
(00:38:20) – Entrepreneurship and imposter syndrome
(00:42:00) – Resilience, revenue diversification and capacity building
(00:50:17) – Gender diversity in journalism leadership
(00:55:08) – Rapid-fire questions
(01:04:06) – Media and local recommendations

Listen to the episode here:

Bio:

Katherine Ann Rowlands is a longtime champion of local journalism, having worked as a leader for three decades in award-winning newsrooms before acquiring and growing an influential regional newswire in the SF Bay Area — back where she began her career as a college intern. Bay City News, which she bought in 2018, has expanded to now cover news in 13 counties 24/7, supplying trustworthy, original journalism for the media ecosystem, from TV and radio to legacy newspapers to start-up digital outlets. Its nonprofit affiliate, which publishes at LocalNewsMatters.org, has trained more than 50 paid interns, adopted transformative technology, published thousands of stories about arts and culture, equity, demographics, the environment and civic life that would otherwise not be told, and partnered with other nonprofits to bolster the information communities need to strengthen democracy.

After attending Macalester College, London School of Economics and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (‘89), Kat worked for news outlets in London, England, The Hague, Netherlands, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras and led teams at the San Luis Obispo Tribune in Central California and the Antioch Daily Ledger, Contra Costa Times and Mercury News in the Bay Area. She taught journalism at Cal State East Bay as well. As a 2017 JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, she focused on how to overcome gender disparities in newsroom leadership roles and ways to bolster the local news ecosystem.

Kat serves as president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition. She is a past president of Journalism and Women Symposium and co-founder of Women Do News, which works to correct the gender gap on Wikipedia by adding and bolstering entries for accomplished women journalists. In 2024, she was honored with the Alumni Award from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Full transcript:

(recorded via Riverside.fm; transcript automated via Castmagic.io, mostly unedited)

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:00:00]:I'm a little bit nostalgic in some ways for the days when we did have a lot more competition because there's an incentive to do better, deeper, more impactful coverage. So it's not that I don't think that there's value in having multiple organizations or different journalists with different experiences and perspectives. But the truth is there are so few of us doing this work that we have to find ways to collaborate with each other so that we can free ourselves up to actually investigate the stories that we have overlooked. There are so many things that are not being reported on, so many city councils that are just operating without any accountability from press. And so at the end of the day, it just makes much more sense to me that we find ways to help each other out so that we do free up resources to cover the uncovered things or the underserved communities.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:01:00]: Welcome to the Local News Matters podcast, where we explore pathways to stronger journalism, better businesses, and healthier communities. I'm Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association.

This episode, I talk with Katherine Ann Rowlands, the owner and publisher of Bay City News, which serves the San Francisco Bay Area. Kat gives a fascinating overview of how Bay City News has evolved from a traditional newswire service to a more dynamic, around-the-clock news organization that includes a for-profit news service and a nonprofit news site, LocalNewsMatters.org. We discuss the challenges of serving two different audiences: media and other institutional clients who rely on Bay City News for the work they do, and the residents of the Bay Area. Kat also talks about the importance of developing a sustainable business model, how their unique model might be replicated, the responsibility to train young journalists, and the importance of ensuring that underserved communities have access to the information they need.

Kat has a long and varied background in journalism. Before taking over Bay City News, she spent three decades working for newsrooms in California, London, The Hague and Honduras. Kat attended Macalester College, London School of Economics and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

If you like this episode and what we're doing more generally, please follow in your favorite podcast app, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about us. This is a side project and a labor of love, and your support means a lot. You can find past episodes, full transcripts, and relevant links, and sign up for our newsletter at localnewsmatterspodcast.com, or for lazy typists like me at lnmpod.com. You also follow us on most social media channels @lnmpod.

And now I bring you Katherine Ann Rowlands.
Alright. Well, welcome, Kat, to the podcast.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:02:48]: Thanks for having me.

History of Bay City News

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:50]: Yeah. The Local News Matters podcast, and you have, localnewsmatters.org. So…

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:02:55]: I know. We have a lot in common. Right?

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:57]: Yes, exactly. So, I want to dig into sort of the whole history of what you're doing now and what and what you've done before and all the—Bay City News and Local News Matters. Really, it's a unique business model that is different than anyone we've had on before. But why don't you start by just telling listeners what it is you're doing? What is Bay City News and localnewsmatters.org?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:03:21]: As you say, we do have a kind of a unique model, that was born out of necessity. We have been around as Bay City News Service since 1979. So that's a 45 year track record, which all on its own, I think is kind of impressive given how many outlets are struggling these days to provide local news and make a go of it in this very public service space. And, of course, this is where my origin story began. I was a college intern at Bay City News, and I think something like 500 people have actually gotten their start in journalism by getting entry level jobs at Bay City News, to learn how to cover cops, how to cover fires, how to cover city council budget hearing, how to be fast and accurate because we are providing news 24 hours a day to most other media in the San Francisco Bay Area. So that means that they depend on us to be not only fast but accurate and to give them tips about things that are breaking in the middle of the night, as well as a lot of civic and court coverage and just keeping track of the trends that affect the whole area. But they also use our stories as is. So when they are short staffed, they can use our reports to supplement their own coverage.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:04:53]: Let's say they're based in San Francisco. Their readers still may be interested in knowing what's happening across the bay in Oakland or Berkeley, but instead of having to staff it themselves and dilute their resources, they can rely on us to provide good quality coverage, and then they can run it and be able to concentrate their efforts elsewhere. So for all of those reasons, we've had value all these years. And, in particular, we've served as kind of a gatekeeper of newsworthy items because our calendar is relied upon by our clients and others to figure out what newsworthy events are happening today. And it's not just putting everything out there, but it's actually verifying and curating that list so that you really know for sure that an important dignitary is coming to town, or you're not sending a five person crew to an event that was canceled. So that kind of reliability has also been important. So I don't see any diminishment for the kinds of things that we have done all these years. Because I started as an intern there, when I was in college.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:06:04]: I had this idea in my head, wouldn't it be fun to run a news organization like this? Maybe this organization. And so for literally 30 years, I had that in the back of my head of something that I would love to do. And I did a lot of other jobs and worked overseas and did a lot of daily newspaper experience and other things. But when I was a JSK Fellow at Stanford in 2016, I heard that the company was for sale. And so that was the moment when I realized that a dream could come true, so I figured out how to buy the enterprise. And then once I had it, it's kind of like the dog catching the car. Right? Now what? So I had to figure out how can we diversify the type of journalism we're doing, and how can we diversify the revenue needed to support that work. And that's when, in addition to having the corporation, I established a nonprofit to live alongside it.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:07:09]: So that formula has actually been very successful. And by every measure, over the last six years since I bought the company, we've been able to grow by 50%. So audience, geography, platforms, content, staff, budget, and I do think that this hybrid model is something that could be replicated in other places.

The news service model

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:07:36]: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about that model. So when you acquired it, would you say, describe it as more of a traditional news service, and how did you evolve it?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:07:46]: There are not that many news services around, actually, and there was one in Chicago for many years. I think there have been others that have started up in New York and other big metro areas. There is still a long time city news service in Los Angeles, that is probably most similar to what we did for many years, and it does serve a purpose in terms of that kind of 24 hour day coverage and filling in the gaps for a lot of other media. One of the things that is useful is that we are very straightforward, very transparent with our sourcing, and very broadcast-oriented in the sense that we say who, what, when, where, why. There's not a lot of flowery language. There's not a ton of feature reporting, but it means that we can really be of service to TV, radio, print, digital, multiple ways of storytelling in a way that can be used. Now one thing that is different and that we added a few years back is we never had visuals, So we added a photo department from scratch because even if you're in the TV world or the print world, you still have a website and you can't very well post a story that's text only and expect to get traffic. You have to have an image of some sort.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:09:14]: So that is an additional product that we started offering and is probably something that we can monetize as well in order to at least cover our costs for providing that kind of platform.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:27]: And what is your revenue model?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:09:30]: So we sell subscriptions to our clients, and there are three or four buckets of types of clients. Most importantly, we serve other media. So depending on how big you are, how large your audience is, how far your reach is, and how you're using our content, you may pay a lot. If you are a small one person operation that has a pretty limited website and you have a very narrow audience, you might pay very little. Commercial operations pay more than nonprofits. Broadcasters probably pay more than print or digital, but it depends on the audience. But that kind of steady revenue where you pay a monthly fee and you get everything we produce, so that means about 40 stories a day. It means all of our date book calendar products, and it also means that you have contact information for the stories that we report.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:10:30]: So let's say we write about a four alarm fire, and it goes out as a text story with maybe a photograph. If you are in radio, you actually need to call the person on scene to get an audio clip. So we provide the contact information so that they can get that extra element for their own broadcast.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:10:52]: And you mentioned, media was one type of client. What are your others?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:10:57]: We also sell licenses for clients who are not republishing but want to get access to the information we provide. So, if you think about PR firms, law firms, government agencies, those are all entities that find value in knowing what's being reported in real time so that they can anticipate what would be of interest to their clients. So somebody who's representing a company, would want to be able to be the eyes and ears of that company in order to let them know that something big is happening. It might be that if you're a government agency, you wanna have an insight into what's gonna affect your constituency as well as your workers. So there's lots of reasons why people would want the information, but don't have a need to republish it. So that's sort of a different type of license, but also brings in revenue for us in order to support the staff.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:11:56]: Yeah. And what comes to mind a little bit is like a Bloomberg terminal, you know, in the business world. Do you republish, do you gather information from other sources ever, or is it all original reporting?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:12:08]: For the most part, we do all original reporting. So we have a big geographic territory. We now cover 13 counties. And for the most part, the reporters and editors report and edit in the places where they are. So we no longer have a centralized headquarters where everyone comes into work. We really prefer that people spend the time in the place where they are. So that makes the storytelling more on the ground and authentic. They're closer to the communities that they're covering, and that makes it possible for us to have a pretty robust report in terms of that full territory.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:12:52]: And what is your staffing like?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:12:55]: So we have about 25 people on staff. And in addition, we have another 30 or so freelancers who may have a specific niche that they cover. It could be arts and culture. It could be in a certain geography like Santa Cruz. It could be that they write a lot about a certain topic like health care. So we do, offer those kinds of opportunities for freelancers to submit their work, and that gets edited and published just like our staff work does as well. We have experimented with using our newswire to distribute work from some other news organizations, but very few. So for example, we will hand curate stories from CalMatters.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:13:49]: If we think the story has relevance to our Bay Area audience, then we will post it on our Newswire under the CalMatters byline as kind of a convenience for our clients. So we do that for CalMatters. We also do that for EdSource on education stories. We do it in a couple of other examples as well. And, generally, I'm a big proponent of not reinventing the wheel. I feel strongly that we should be collaborating and helping each other out as opposed to duplicating effort on similar stories. And so this is one way that we can be helpful to our clients and also amplify the work of peers who have the same journalistic standards as we do in terms of the quality of their work and just help them get a little bit of a boost in terms of audience and visibility.

Collaboration and competition in local news

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:14:42]: Yeah. That nonduplication point is something I think a lot of metro areas could use. And what came to mind as you were talking, a couple episodes ago, I talked with Alison Taylor Levine in Delaware, and she started the Local News Initiative there and had come from a community foundation background. And one of the things, when they just went out and talked to community members, one of the things, you know, people who had no understanding of how news works was getting rid of that duplication. Like, why do you have three news teams covering this fire or this thing. Can't you collaborate and so you can do more original reporting? And is that something, is that the kind of feedback you're getting from the newsrooms themselves that this lets them have the reach and rhythm of stories, but they can really focus on what is their wheelhouse and their hyperlocal area?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:15:33]: Yeah. Honestly, I am a little bit nostalgic in some ways for the days when we did have a lot more competition because there's an incentive to do better, deeper, more impactful coverage. So it's not that I don't think that there's value in having multiple organizations or different journalists with different experiences and perspectives look at the same issue or even attend the same event. But the truth is there are so few of us doing this work that we have to find ways to collaborate with each other so that we can free ourselves up to actually investigate the stories that we have overlooked. There are so many things that are not being reported on, so many city councils that are just operating without any accountability from press, and so many examples of data, trends, community events, population changes, examples of both wonderful and horrible things that happen in our communities that are just not being covered. And so at the end of the day, it just makes much more sense to me that we find ways to help each other out so that we do free up resources to cover the uncovered things or the underserved communities.

Launching Local News Matters, partnerships and expansion

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:16:52]: Yeah. So that's the core of your business, but then you launched Local News Matters and started putting some of your content out directly to, you know, news readers. So talk a little bit about that transition or addition.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:17:04]: I started Bay City News Foundation in order to attract philanthropic support to cover those underserved communities, stories, events, trends, etcetera, that I felt were not being well covered by commercial media. And that has allowed us to not only sustain and build stronger content for the Newswire, but it's also enabled us to serve our mission of being able to better report on the community where we are. And one way is to create a whole new platform. So that was the reason behind creating localnewsmatters.org. It's a place where we can experiment and try new things and also publish our philanthropically supported content for free. There's no paywall. At the moment, there's no advertising. We don't require membership.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:18:05]: This is intended to be a public service, and we give away the stories and other content for free because we want it to be amplified and we want it to be picked up and used in the biggest way possible. And this has ended up being really fun and really impactful because we cover all kinds of stories and we can make it a much more visual site. So we have original photography. We do some fun things with design. We even have a cartoonist on staff, and we also have put an emphasis on data journalism. So we frequently will put some extra effort into creating data visualizations to show how things are changing in our region over time, to be able to have readers look at how one specific county compares with the other county next door or the region as a whole. These are all the kinds of add ons to what we had done for many years with text only that really make for a great reader experience because there's so many different ways that you can tell a story. And this has also led us to experiment with other things, like, of course, we have regular diet of social media posts, but we wanted to reach the 18 to 25 audience more impactfully, so we started a TikTok account specifically around this election.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:19:37]: We have recently partnered with Radio Sausalito and have been broadcasting a weekly news show and a weekly arts and culture show. We recently merged with another organization in Mendocino County, and one of the first things we did was to make friends with the NPR affiliate there, KZYX, in order to have an additional platform to spread the news that we were already doing. So all of these things are ways that we've been experimenting to try and amplify the work that we were already doing, but in ways that might meet new audience members where they are.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:20:22]: Is all of the are all of the stories and all of the content around them there, is that made available to your service, or is some of that exclusive?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:20:31]: Anything that we produce originally for localnewsmatters.org, our nonprofit site, does get put onto the wire service as a convenience. We don't charge extra for it, but we do use that as a way to distribute it more broadly. The stories that are on the Bay City News newswire, however, are commercially valuable, and so we only put some of those and at a later time onto the nonprofit site. So if you think about it that way, the Local News Matters site is kind of a client, if you will, and we pick and choose the stories that have longer shelf life, that have more regional context, the stories that have more of a feature event, and we don't put any real breaking disasters, crime, things like that onto the Local News Matters site.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:21:27]: Got it. And I think that pretty much answers the question I was gonna ask, which was were you worried about cannibalization, but I think that's how you address that.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:21:35]: I do think about that, but there's other things that we offer through the Bay City News service wire that are exclusive to that platform. So, for example, the datebook calendar I mentioned where we curate and verify newsworthy events in the region is only available to clients. You can't get that on a public site, and so that is of particular value. Also, the kind of leads, if you will, for where our sources can be found with phone numbers and emails and other contact information is something that's exclusive to our clients. It's not made publicly available. And then the other thing is the 24 hour a day coverage. We are committed to being awake at all hours, so other people can actually rest, and that has value as well.

Advice for replicating the Bay City News model in other regions

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:22:28]: And as you said earlier, there aren't a lot of these services, but you also said early on that you said this was a model that others could certainly learn from. So, you know, what size metropolitan area or regional area do you think you need? How many clients? Like, if you were to go in and advise a group, what would you tell them to think about to determine if this model might work in their area?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:22:53]: I think it works really well for a place like the San Francisco Bay Area because there's a lot of commonality between the different counties and cities. So you may work in Oakland, but live in San Francisco, and maybe your relatives are in Marin County, and maybe you like to go for hikes in Santa Clara County. So you have an interest just by being in this region in all of those places. And so the news that happens regionally is gonna be of interest to you. So that is one way to look at it. And there are lots of places that would fit that kind of definition just off the top of my head, Houston or Miami, New York, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Seattle. Like, those are some examples, But I actually think that you can imagine this kind of model working in a much smaller area. So let's just take as an example Marin County.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:23:55]: So we cover Marin County, and there are also another 10 or 12 small news organizations that are there. I don't think us being there should be competition. I think that we should be there and be supported in order to support all of the organizations. So if, for example, we had funding to put two, three, four or five full time reporters in the county, we could cover the areas that are underserved right now, make available those stories to everybody else who's already in the ecosystem, and allow them to not only serve their niche audiences, but make their overall coverage more robust because all of a sudden you would have more stories about the county or about the next door city or about the impact of climate change on low lying areas that are prone to flooding or sea level rise along the coast or thinking about housing and homelessness in the area and how what impacts a major city like San Rafael or Novato is also trickling out to impact people who are in much more rural areas nearby. So these are the kinds of trend stories, government stories, issue stories that we could do and give to the rest of the news outlets that are there in order to better serve their audiences. And if over time, in addition to philanthropic support, they were able to do some of their own fundraising or build their own audiences, they too would have more revenue in order to pay into that central model where we could pour the money back into additional reporting resources. And having that kind of backbone, I think, can be of service to many.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:25:50]: So a couple of other examples, we, as a nonprofit and our own 501c3, have a lot of infrastructure in terms of fundraising, bookkeeping, legal support, editors who are on duty 24 hours a day, a photography department, people who know how to make visual graphics. So we can actually supply all those things to smaller organizations for a very minimal cost, and that makes their coverage better, but they don't have to reinvest or reinvent the wheel and start doing all those things themselves. So in the case of Piedmont, for example, which is a town of about 10,000 people surrounded by Oakland in Alameda County, they are fiscally sponsored by Bay City News Foundation. We also provide content to them. We also provide bookkeeping services for them. We do lots in arts, of arts and culture coverage about the region so that they can pick that up and not have to do it themselves even though they know their audience would like that. So it's a way for them to get it very efficiently. The other example would be we recently merged with the Mendocino Voice, which is the far northernmost piece of geography that we now have, and they already have some stakeholder staff who are in the county that we kept in place.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:27:24]: But, again, we have 24 hour day coverage. We have those other components that I mentioned that can be of help to prop up their organization without them having to do every little thing themselves. So, if you go back to the idea of doing this in Marin County, you know, there's some small daily newspapers, there are some weekly papers, there's, Radio Sausalito, there's the Point Reyes Light, there's the Marin IJ and others who could benefit from having an organization like ours which has infrastructure, but allow them to dig a little deeper and serve their audiences better.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:28:08]: Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. I know there's a lot of talk these days about shared services as something the industry really needs. And so I can see a lot of those services and how valuable they would be, you know, even in a concentrated area. On the news side, you said you see some clients just running it as is, and some of them are taking your sources and getting their own quotes and adding to it. What’s sort of the range of things you might see? So if this were in, you know, a Denver or a Marin County or some more constrained areas, and people are worried about is all our content gonna look the same, and is it gonna water us down as a distinctive voice in that area? What have you seen ways people take what you're doing and really add value to it?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:28:52]: Once you have a license from Bay City News, you can do what you want with the content. So in some cases, no one even mentions that it came from Bay City News, and that's okay because they are adding in their own quotes. They're doing their own reporting. They're layering on top of it. They're maybe shifting the lead to be more specific to their geography, but the basic content is gonna be accurate and valuable as is. So if you are not able to add those extra elements on top of it, the story can still stand. But a lot of times, they will adjust the content or add to it to make it more relevant for their audience. We do a roundup, for example, twice a day, so around four in the afternoon and four in the morning.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:29:48]: What are the top stories from around the region summarized in three or four sentences or paragraphs? That's a nice way to just get a feel for everything important that's going on around us, but that's not the same thing as doing an investigative report or doing a long form Q&A with a local politician or looking deeply into data or public records to find trends. So we really are providing some relief to news organizations so that they can do that other deeper digging into stories. Now that said, we take pride in the enterprise stories that we do as well, and so that's something that is really wonderful for the staff to be able to be given time to do not just the breaking news, but also to dig deeply into stories. So, for example, we have a reporter named Joe Dworetzky, who spent a lot of time looking into some of the services that were being provided to unhoused people in San Francisco, and he found a lot of waste, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of problems in the way resources were being distributed, and not a lot of impact for the population that was at risk. It took him weeks, if not months, to actually compile all the data and the records and do the interviews and craft a really well told story. And at the end of the day, it made a huge impact. Like, there was policy that changed as a result. And so, we ourselves appreciate having a little bit of relief off the daily grind to be able to do the enterprise stories.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:31:33]: And then we, of course, we have amazing distribution power. We can put that on the wire, and it reaches as many as 10 million people if it gets picked up by our clients on the TV, the radio, the digital, and the print platforms. Another example, we had a bilingual reporter who was from Stockton, and she was covering local government agencies there and doing a lot of daily stories about crime, about local government, about events. But because she was doing that beat reporting, she realized that they were giving public information out to a community without translating it into the language that was spoken in the community, Spanish. So because she speaks both English and Spanish, she was able to talk to people about how badly that was in terms of service from the local government, how excluded they felt from not getting the critical information that was being delivered, and how harmful it was to the community overall to be excluded like that. So when she wrote her story, and we published it in both English and Spanish, the community felt heard, and the local government was embarrassed about not living up to their own standards, and they changed their policy. So the next time that there was a public meeting, they actually had translation services available. So those kinds of stories emerge out of the beat reporting that we do all the time and is also of value.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:33:15]: And, it's really gratifying to be able to publish it for free on the localnewsmatters.org site so that everyone who should be seeing those stories can get to it easily, but also have the power of distribution by sending it on the wire and having it get picked up and spread widely.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:33:35]: I'm curious. How long between when you bought it did you—how long after that did you launch localnewsmatters.org?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:33:43]: About two months.

Balancing client needs with community coverage

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:33:44]: Okay. So very quickly. So this may impact this answer, but, you know, particularly thinking of this as a news service, you're removed from the end user. How do you—what's the assignment editing? How do you ensure that you're both serving the needs of the community and your clients?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:34:06]: Well, that's a hard question. It's, I guess, one way to tackle that is to think about distinct audiences, and our core business is still the newswire. So our audience there is gonna be news directors, assignment editors, frontline editors, and producers. And I know them well because I had those kinds of jobs for most of my career. So if you've been in journalism for a long time, you have a kind of intuitive sense about how to sift through the hundreds or thousands of things that come in your inbox to select the ones that are gonna be most important, most impactful, most urgent. So I do think about that audience in that way, but they, of course, are proxy for the 10 million population that is in the Greater Bay Area. So I also think about the residents who are gonna need that information and also how we can be sure that we're providing content that is gonna be impactful, not just for stakeholders or other decision makers in media or government, but also for everyday people who need to have critical information to make better decisions for themselves and their families. Right? So having the localnewsmatters.org website, where we have a public facing free outlet is another way for us to test our assumptions about what stories are important or what stories are gonna have impact or are relevant.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:35:55]: So we have now been developing our own organic audience on localnewsmatters.org, and we have a very rigorous process of assessing the feedback that we get. We look at metrics, of course, how many people are clicking on the stories. We have a series of newsletters that people subscribe to, and so we track those open rates and look at what people are interested in clicking on and reading and spending time with and learning more about. We have our social media platforms as well where we also monitor that. But we also make a habit of going back to our sources and also just asking community members, what did you think of that story? Did you like it? Did you think it was accurate? Did you think we missed something? What do you think we should do next? So those kinds of questions that go directly to our readers is another way of gathering insight and helping us make better choices about what stories we cover. So I know from my background as being a metro editor, for example, that it can be frustrating to a reporter covering a city to realize once you start paying attention to metrics that maybe your story is not getting very many clicks. So that's one data point. It doesn't mean that you stop covering local government, but it does indicate that maybe there's other ways to do the storytelling.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:37:34]: And so having that dialogue with an actual audience as well as the stakeholders that I have on the wire service side gives us a pretty amazing robust picture of what's working and what's not. And we have a person whose job it is to be an impact manager, and she looks at the data, and she looks at the anecdotal evidence and helps us craft surveys and helps us do outreach and encourages staff to make those extra calls to say, what did you think about this story? What else should we be doing? So we meet once a week, literally, just to talk about this, and that helps us make some choices.

Entrepreneurship and imposter syndrome

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:38:20]: Let's talk a little bit about when you first became aware that the Bay City News was, might be coming on the market. You were in your fellowship. And I read somewhere else that you kind of shifted and started taking a lot of classes at the Stanford School of Business. Tell me a little bit about what that process was like and how you were thinking about it. And was there an intimidation or an impostor syndrome to making that leap, into owning that?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:38:48]: Of course. There's no way that you can go from being a journalist to being a publisher without having imposter syndrome and worrying about whether you have the skill set and being able to face that kind of leap and risk. And so taking classes in the business school was of no help there, I have to say. Everyone I asked, should I do this? They said no. And it was very discouraging for a while until I realized something, and that was that if you are pursuing a career as an entrepreneur and you are thinking about starting or investing in a business, you're looking for that hockey stick type of growth where you have some investment and then you have rapid acceleration of profit. And so the motivation to shareholders or to fellow investors or to employees and to the marketplace is really different when you're thinking about business in most cases. In journalism, we have a really different framework and a really different sense of public service, mission-driven inspiration. And so for me, I don't wanna lose money.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:40:15]: I don't wanna lose my house. I would like to recoup the investment that I made, but my motivation is really to fill the need for good quality local news that is of value to the community. And so if I break even, I feel satisfied. If I'm able to grow the content, I feel satisfied. If I'm able to launch the careers and support dozens of journalists along the way, I feel satisfied. And, in fact, one part of our mission actually is to support the next generation of journalists and create pathways for them. So up to this point, we've supported 50 paid interns at Bay City News and given them amazing practical experience of on the ground reporting, very close editing, permission to pursue ambitious projects and really have a kind of capstone piece that can set their resumes apart when they go out to look for those journalism jobs after the internship. And I feel super proud of that because somebody gave me a chance way back when I was in college and looking for an internship to learn about journalism, and I've loved it my entire life.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:41:32]: And so if I can give back in that way, then it's worthwhile. But I'm not expecting them to become full time employees. And if they launch off to go in a different direction or a different organization, that's okay. I still am applauding from the sidelines as they launch their career. So to me, those are the kinds of things that are important. And, even if I fail tomorrow, I will have no regrets.

Resilience, revenue diversification and capacity building

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:42:00]: I am curious. What did you learn at the business school and just in the rest of that fellowship? And from a strategic standpoint, what did you take into the business?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:42:10]: I mean, there was a lot of conversation around what business models could be successful to support local news, and it is just tough. I think it's really, really hard, and you can see that all across the country with so many worthy, valuable news organizations that have failed and gone under or have contracted to the point where they are just shadows of their former selves, and the communities suffer as a result. So I do think that we have done a terrible job in telling our own story about the value of news and how important it is to democracy. And if you don't have people who are present at the local city council meeting and you don't have people who are asking tough questions and who are actually looking at the records and seeking out contradictions and making people follow through on promises that you really start to lose an important part of the fabric of society. And we have just not done a good enough job of explaining why that matters and how there are more studies and a lot more conversation, I would say, in the last year or two that articulate this really well to show that there actually is more corruption. There's less civic engagement. There are really bad things that happen to society when you don't have a strong local news outlet paying attention. And so people are talking about that more.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:43:47]: And the trick, of course, is what was in discussion at the business school and among every journalist I talk to, which is how can you support it financially? And so to me, you have to have radical diversification of revenue streams because if we're relying on one grant and we don't get it, we don't wanna have to lay off staff. If we're relying on one big client and they go bankrupt, we can't afford to lay people off and diminish our service. If we fail to attract a new audience to subscribe to a newsletter or to pay us small donations every month or we have a major donor who decides that they're changing their priorities and they wanna give to something else. All of those things have the potential to be devastating. But if you have lots of different ways that you're bringing in revenue, then you can safeguard the enterprise and still keep moving ahead. I will say it's been frustrating for me not to get a capacity-building grant to support the work that we're doing. Because if I had the money to hire another salesperson, another grant writer, another kind of business liaison to be sure that our customers are happy and a person to scope out new products that might be monetizable and worth adding to our portfolio, we would be able to double what we do now in all those metrics that I mentioned before in geography and content and audience and product and budget and staffing. So just having those little extra boosts for revenue generating positions makes a huge difference, and, of course, this is starting to be recognized by some of the big funders. So the Press Forward Initiative, AJP, the Knight Foundation, local community foundations are all starting to pay more attention to that important piece.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:45:53]: A lot of the audits that news organizations have done to assess their own operations have been super helpful in helping to think more strategically about how to be sustainable. But the truth is there is just not enough to go around. And for some organizations to be favored and others to lose out is super frustrating because so many are worthy. So many people are doing such amazing work. And so that's partly why I still believe so strongly that we cannot afford to compete against each other. We have to figure out ways to collaborate and why I think this hybrid model that we pursued where we can provide that kind of ecosystem support for many is something that could be replicated, not just around big cities, but also smaller areas as well.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:46:50]: Well said. And, you know, I just wanna point out and maybe see if you have any further thoughts. Embedded in what you were saying about revenue diversification is also an implication that you can't be living paycheck to paycheck as a business. Right? You've got to have a little reserve or cushion or, you know, a small decline from a grant or audience or advertiser or whatever is gonna, you know, send you into the red and cause you to lay off people. So how do you think about reserves and having some resilience?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:47:24]: Well, I wish I had more reserves, but I am personally very resilient. I mean, I would say I have a pretty high tolerance for risk, but I own all the shares of the company. I do not have a financial partner in this. And, at the end of the day, if, you know, the overnight editor gets sick and we can't find a replacement, I'm staying up all night to be sure that the wire keeps running. If something catastrophic happens with one of our clients or one of our big funders, the buck stops with me, and so I have to be prepared to put my own livelihood on the line.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:48:03]: And that's okay. Up until this point, having been doing this for six years and because we've been able to grow, I feel like we've proven that we have a good sustainable model, but it would be better if we had the backing of a capacity-building grant in order to reinvest in those kind of revenue streams that we all need more of. So, I mean, it's a balancing act for sure, and, I guess, you know, you always try to reassess where should I put the resources that, is gonna make the biggest difference. And as a journalist, you're always tempted to fund the project or the beat reporter or the extra editor in order to make sure that your content is the best it can be. But sometimes, you have to sacrifice that in the short term and instead invest in the revenue generating piece or the administrative piece or something else like technology, for example. When we started, six years ago, the infrastructure in terms of technology was literally falling apart. We had to figure out a way to modernize everything because that's what kept me up at night. And when COVID hit, literally, the servers and everything from our office came into my living room, and I could not leave for more than an hour from the house in case I had to come back and reset the server so that our clients were not left waiting for the next story.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:49:47]: So, thankfully, we have transformed ourselves since those days, but the analogy works for many different parts of any kind of news business. There has to be upkeep. There has to be maintenance. You have to reward your employees for working hard. You have to be able to take some risks and experiment even if things don't always work out, but you're not gonna get anywhere if you don't at least try all those different things.

Gender diversity in journalism leadership

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:50:17]: And last question before we go into rapid fire. So when you started the fellowship, I believe your focus was on getting more women into journalism, and you are or have been president of Journalism and Women's Symposium (JAWS). So talk a little bit about where you see the state of gender diversity in the industry.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:50:39]: Not good enough. I am very, very frustrated about how little the needle has moved in terms of having equal representation at leadership level positions in the news industry, and it frankly translates into us not doing a very good or accurate job in representing the communities that we serve. That was the motivation for me starting that project when I went into the JSK Fellowship Program to try and figure out how to address that problem and make a difference. And ironically, of course, since I learned the company, Bay City News, was for sale and figured out a way to buy it and evolve it and sustain it and grow it, I created a leadership position for myself. I had been knocking up against that glass ceiling in traditional media companies and feeling frustrated about not being able to jump to the next level of leadership. And when it wasn't happening, there was no reason for me not to just go out on my own and start something or build something of my own and create that opportunity. So I know for a fact that it's an inspiring story to other women and young women especially. And the silver lining in my research was that if you look at the composition of start ups, many of them are being started or being led by women.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:52:08]: And so even if it's not a changed situation in legacy companies, it is a different story when you look at all the innovation that's happening. And, of course, the JSK Fellowship Program has done an amazing job in supporting people of color and women who may have been overlooked in other places, but are now able to launch leadership positions and careers of their own. So that is really inspiring. Another little project that I'm proud of working on is I co-founded with Angelie Shaw a project called Women Do News, and our mission is to equalize the playing field for Wikipedia entries. About 80% of the entries are about men, 20% for women, and about 80% of the editors on Wikipedia are men versus 20% women. And so by training people, by nominating people, by holding edit-a-thons, by telling the world about why this matters. It's starting to make a difference, but it's really sort of one entry at a time. It's slow, methodical, careful work, but it's so worth it because if you can just get one more person the visibility that they deserve and the credit that they deserve, they're a role model for many others. So it does make a difference.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:53:46]: We, you know, we talked about impostor syndrome earlier, and I don't know how much this is getting talked about in our field, but I've heard more and more discussion about that. And my understanding of the research is that women tend to be held back by impostor syndrome more than men. You know, there's the stereotype of the white man who thinks he can do anything and just throws his hat into the ring and the women are debating whether they are worthy. And so I think that's a discussion we should have in this field too, particularly on the business side and entrepreneurship side.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:54:18]: There is a lot of good training, whether it's around leadership or building skill sets or creating opportunities. I will say that there needs to be more funding for women entrepreneurs because access to capital. If you look at the venture capital world, for example, those numbers are even worse. And yet if you look at the outcomes, the companies that are led by women tend to be more profitable and do better and are more sustainable. So there is a disconnect there, and so I'm hopeful that more women like myself will be acknowledged and supported financially so we can continue to grow these enterprises and then turn around and create new opportunities for others too.

Rapid-fire questions

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:08]: Alright. So let's finish up with the rapid fire segment. And my questions are short, but your answers don't have to be, and I might even ask for elaboration from time to time. So compared to a year ago, are you more or less optimistic about the future of local news?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:55:22]: I'm more optimistic because there's a lot more conversation about why we matter to democracy and also the need for more financial support, whether it's philanthropic or whether it's through capacity-building or other ways to get the kind of revenue to support organizations.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:45]: Does AI fill you with more hope or dread when it comes to journalism?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:55:49]: I'm actually super excited about AI. On our Local News Matters website, we have a whole section called “Experiments with AI,” and our approach is to have radical transparency about not just that we're using it on certain projects, but how. So we take readers along the journey with us to explain what works, what fails, what the risks are, and we always have that human component to check and disclose things that don't go well. We're using it, in fact, for this election. We used some tools that were not available even a few weeks ago to scrape PDFs from county registrars, pull it into a spreadsheet, apply code that we prompted through Claude and ChatGPT in order to push it into a dashboard that's friendly for users to be able to see, and this whole experiment is saving hundreds of hours of work. Having the extra editorial safeguards in place make it reliable and verified, but the AI is what's allowing us to make that happen.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:57:00]: What's the best single piece of advice, or do you have a favorite piece of advice that you've received or like to give?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:57:08]: Make each meeting have only one topic. And so you can focus the conversation and get things done. And it is also helpful in those one topic meetings to have a desired outcome so that you can be more efficient in making the needle move.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:57:31]: Is there a piece of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy in its wrongness or oversimplification?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:57:41]: I don't actually think that the audience pays that much attention to the source of content, and that is frustrating for journalists who take pride in their work. But it's also a reality that we should be paying more attention to as an industry and being sure that we're providing the content that people need and want but not stressing overly about what the byline says or what the source is as long as it's verified. And it ties into my belief that we have to collaborate and not compete with each other.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:20]: As a longtime Bay resident and Stanford JSK Fellow, you know failure is valorized in Silicon Valley, but we don't like to talk about it in journalism. Do you have a favorite failure of yours?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [00:58:34]: I mean, I still could fail in this whole enterprise. There's a risk for sure, and if all of those doomsday scenarios happened at once, I could go under, but as I said, I would have no regrets. We've published hundreds of thousands of stories that wouldn't have otherwise been written. I've launched the careers of 50 paid interns over the last six years and supported dozens of journalists in doing the work that they love and are good at and feel challenged by. We've been able to support other news organizations, and so, I mean, it could end tomorrow. And I think all of us who are in this industry have to be aware that failure is a possibility, but I don't think of it too much that way. I'm 58. My dad worked until he was 89, so that means I have three more decades of work to do and life to live. So I could reinvent myself again if I had to, but I don't think we're gonna fail. I think we're just gonna have to keep evolving.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:59:42]: That reminded me of an interview I heard recently or couple years ago with Jim Collins, one of the few he's done, the author of Good to Great. And, you know, he's, I think, in his mid to late sixties, and he was talking about age, and he was pointing out, I think it was Peter Drucker, produced a lot of his most influential works after 65 and kept writing until he was 90. And as you know out there, there are—if the life extension movement, if they have success, you know, we'll all live to 125. Anyway, it changes your thinking when you're not, you know, in your fifties, which I am, thinking about retirement, but you're thinking about you could have several decades left to do good work. And I think that's a healthy way to think about what's in front of you.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:00:34]: There's so much to do, and I do believe that the people who are happiest are doing the work that has meaning. And so I've never done anything else except journalism since I was 18 and started working for school newspapers and then ended up getting that first internship at Bay City News when I was in college. So the thing that's exciting about this time is that the landscape is shifting dramatically and really fast, so we have to be willing to take on a lot more risk and to pivot quickly and to be willing to fail. And so that's sort of what I think about when I take a leap, like buying Bay City News or experimenting on TikTok or merging with another organization or testing out radio that we haven't done before. All those things are new experiences, and I'm not good at them yet, so you have to be willing to accept that steep learning curve. But at the end of the day, that's what makes it fun. And when things succeed, that's an amazing feeling.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:01:59]: What's—you know, you've got a 24/7 news service in a broad area, and sometimes you're jumping in overnight. It can be stressful, and running a business and a nonprofit can be stressful. What's one thing you do to maintain your sanity and mental health?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:02:16]: I have this giant gong in my house. And so when I get mad or when I'm celebrating something, I bang the gong.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:02:26]: That's nice. Do you have people around you that get annoyed at the noise?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:02:29]: No. They love it. We bring it to all weddings, funerals and birthday parties.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:02:36]: Nice. As a leader, how do you help your team maintain their mental health?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:02:41]: I try to praise people as much as possible for the work that they do, and I also really let them do their jobs and try not to micromanage. And I throw parties. I feed people, I encourage them to take vacations, and everyone has to let off a little steam, so trying to make sure that people keep their own boundaries as much as possible.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:03:10]: What's your smartest time saving hack?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:03:13]: I document everything so that when I'm in a position where I can delegate it to somebody else, I can just point them to the document which tells them how to do something, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:03:29]: Five years out, what does wild success look like?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:03:34]: Wild success would be doubling what we're doing right now and having those reserves you talked about, where not only can we afford to fail more often when we experiment with things and not be at risk of having to, collapse or cut back or reduce the things that we're committed to doing, but also to give ourselves a little bit of a break. I'd like to be able to take a month-long vacation without worry.

Media and local recommendations

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:04:06]: So now for the recommendations. So if someone's visiting the Bay Area, what are three to five activities or places you would recommend?

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:04:16]: I was born and raised in Berkeley, where I still live, and I always take visitors up to Grizzly Peak, which is this windy hilltop road where you can look out over the entire Bay Area, and it's beautiful on a sunny day. It's also spectacular at night with all the twinkly lights, so that's number one. I also think that a walk through the UC Berkeley campus is a must do activity. There's so many beautiful parks and buildings and lots of activity and lots of history, so that's definitely worthwhile. And then, Zachary's Pizza is still pretty good, so I would recommend stopping in there for a slice.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:05:02]: What three to five pieces of media that you recommend? This can be news related or just pure entertainment.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:05:08]: I like Nikita Roy's Newsroom Robots podcast. I'm interested in AI, and I think she's just super smart about how she challenges us to think differently about technology. I also recommend a book called Prison Truth by William Drummond. He is on my board, and he's a long time professor and journalist who has done a lot of work with the San Quentin News and mentored many incarcerated journalists to get their work published. And as you may know, we actually have a prison journalist on staff at Bay City News, Steve Brooks, who writes for a section on our Local News Matters site called Inside Out and brings a really unique perspective to help understand criminal justice reform and life on the inside that you don't normally have access to. So a lot of that is really well reported out in this book called Prison Truth as well. And the third thing I would suggest is listening to Radio Sausalito, one of our new partners. They're essentially a jazz station, and you can find them online and listen to an amazing variety of music, but also tap into our news broadcast and our arts and culture broadcast once a week.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:06:43]: Well, thanks so much for your time. And as we do with all our guests, we'll put, you know, all the contact, you know, links to everything, in the show notes. But knowing you as I do and seeing you at conferences all the time, I imagine if there are others out there who are thinking about the kind of business model you have, replicating that in their city, that you would be happy to to share your advice with them, and they could just reach out to you.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:07:06]: Absolutely.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:07]: Well, thanks again. This has been great.

KATHERINE ANN ROWLANDS [01:07:09]: Alright. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate the chance to talk with you.

TIM REGAN-PORTER [01:07:15]: Thank you for listening to the Local News Matters podcast. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player and sign up for our newsletter at lnmpod.com.

And thanks to our production partners at Pirate Audio. Pirate Audio believes every community deserves great things to listen to, and they're on a mission to help local newsrooms reach their communities via audio. If you're interested in starting a podcast or need production support for an existing one, let me know, and I'll be happy to connect you.

If you have guest recommendations, others doing interesting and innovative work in local news, let me know through the contact form at the website, lnmpod.com.

Past guests on the Local News Matters podcast include: Jim O’Rourke (O’Rourke Media Group), Teri Finneman, Nick Mathews and Pat Ferrucci (Reviving Local News), Nic Dawes (THE CITY), Allison Taylor Levine (Local News Initiative Delaware), Crystal Good (Black by God), Lisa Snowden (Baltimore Beat), Karen Rundlet (INN), Jim Brady (Knight Foundation), Candice Fortman (Exit interview, Outlier Media), Jean Friedman-Rudovsky (Resolve Philly), Jay Rosen (NYU), Sue Cross (Exit interview, INN), Mary Margaret White (Mississippi Today), Amy Kovac-Ashley (Tiny News Collective), Michael Shapiro (TAPinto), Kenny Katzgrau (redbankgreen and Broadstreet), John Garrett (Community Impact), Shannon Kinney (Dream Local Digital), Larry Ryckman (The Colorado Sun), Frank Mungeam (Local Media Association), Kelly Ann Scott (Alabama Media Group), Sara Lomax and S. Mitra Kalita (URL Media), Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro (National Trust for Local News), Mike Rispoli and Richard Young (via When the People Decide), Sarabeth Berman (American Journalism Project), Rabbi Hillel Goldberg and Shana Goldberg (Intermountain Jewish News), Lyndsay C. Green (via The Journalism Salute), Rashad Mahmood and Mark Glaser (New Mexico Local News Fund), Christian Vanek and Barbara Hardt (The Mountain-Ear), Dan Grech (BizHack), Zack Richner (Easy Tax Credits), Tracie Powell (Pivot Fund), Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective), Linda Shapley (via What Works), Yehong Zhu and Jake Seaton (Zette, Column), Charity Huff (January Spring), Joaquin Alvarado and Dave Perry (Aurora Sentinel), Steve Waldman (Rebuild Local News), Maritza Félix (Conecta Arizona), Michael Bolden (American Press Institute), Jeff Roberts and Corey Hutchins (CFOIC, Colorado College), Eve Pearlman and Erica Anderson (Spaceship Media), Jennifer Brandel (Hearken, Democracy SOS), Corey Hutchins with Bay Edwards, Todd Chamberlain and Raleigh Burleigh (Sopris Sun).