Katherine A. Rowlands has moved at a fast clip since she bought the Bay City News regional wire service in April 2018 and installed herself as publisher. Her wire service continues to serve paid subscribers that include not only major regional news media outlets but also public relations/marketing agencies, law firms, local companies, and government and political entities.

But Kat Rowlands also has added a non-profit arm, Bay City News Foundation and a consumer-facing website LocalNewsMatters.org, and solicited donations that have financially brightened the 40-year-old enterprise’s future. She has developed collaborations and has explored adding photos and graphic elements to the traditional just-the-facts news filings. Rowlands also has added staff to the BCN’s eight bureaus and given work to veteran journalists laid off by the region’s struggling newspapers.

It was a coming home of sorts for Rowlands when she surprised Bay Area journalists by buying BCN. She began her career at the news service and eventually served as managing editor. The Berkeley native has been in Bay Area journalism for 32 years, holding top management positions including at Bay Area News Group (which included the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News). She helped prepare herself for the challenge by taking a break from daily journalism as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2016-17. At Stanford, she studied sustainable models for local journalism as well as best practices for promoting more women into media leadership positions. Today, the BCN business model reflects her view that a hybrid entity that combines community and public service work via the nonprofit and the 24/7 reporting and distribution power of the for-profit newswire could be a replicable model for other regions.

Here, Rowlands responds to questions posed by Ward Bushee, former Editor of The San Francisco Chronicle.

Question: With almost one year under your belt as the owner and publisher, what can you tell us about the state of the journalism and the business enterprise at BCN?

Answer: Bay City News is in a very strong position to do good journalism that matters and evolve with the changing landscape. Traditional media organizations have been pummeled in the last decade and many fine journalists have lost jobs, but the need for information has never been greater. Since BCN provides critical news posts to virtually every news organization in the region, I can watch how our 24/7 coverage is used as newsroom managers are forced to make tough choices about what not to cover themselves and how to use our service as a way to fill in the gaps. We have added clients during the past year, grown our staff, and improved both the quantity and quality of our product to reinforce our value. My challenge now is to provide more coverage of the Bay Area so those clients — and their audiences — get what they need on multiple platforms.

Q: What have you learned about the value of using a non-profit component to your organization? What have been the road bumps?

A: Starting the nonprofit Bay City News Foundation has given us an incredible boost. Bay Area residents are hungry for more community news and people who care about this public service work are willing to support it. In just six months, we raised $115,000 in donations, which was enough to launch the nonprofit foundation, create the LocalNewsMatters.org site to showcase our work, start a year-round paid internship program, and pay at least a dozen experienced freelance reporters and editors to do stories that matter. We not only produce community journalism but we also build collaborative partnerships with other nonprofit media to highlight their work and provide a platform to experiment with new information gathering and delivery tools. Creating more content is good for our clients — but ultimately the 8 million residents of the Bay Area are the beneficiaries of this expanded coverage.

The only road bumps are related to speed and capacity; I’m the sole owner so building the nonprofit, growing the company, managing the volunteers, and spearheading new initiatives is a lot. Fortunately, I’m at a stage in my life with grown kids and a lot of experience under my belt when I can give this venture everything I’ve got. With more awareness of our work, we hope to double our donations and grant funding this year so we can expand the journalism we do. It is gratifying to see how this project resonates: I’ve had former BCN staff offer to volunteer as mentors; I’ve had colleagues from my career in newspapers offer connections; and I’ve had friends and supporters donate money and time.

Q: Do you think your nonprofit and for-profit hybrid model could be a solution to bringing back community journalism and possibly even restoring news organizations in the so-called news deserts that have increasingly shown up across the land?

A: This hybrid model has a lot of potential, not only to bolster what we are doing in the Bay Area with breaking news at BCN and community coverage at LocalNewsMatters.org, but also to test a new model that could be replicated. With the collapse of advertising, news organizations have to experiment with new revenue models — and the combination of a B2B business for newsgathering and delivery with a nonprofit for community and public service creation is compelling. We researched other wire services, collaborative and co-op groups, nonprofit startups, for-profit ventures and public benefit models before choosing our hybrid structure.

Think of it as a strategy to diversify revenue and meet the public service mission of journalism at the same time. As long as the newswire, which operates as a corporation, can break even or make a profit, then the newsgathering and delivery vehicle is secure and able to amplify the journalism. The growth in community content can develop via the nonprofit so that every dollar donated supports the journalism that audiences need and want, including data, thought pieces and local news about arts and culture, education, state and local politics, the environment, and more. The synergy of the two branches of BCN could have a tremendous impact on the region and beyond.

If you look at our Bay City News Foundation website, you can see updates about our progress and details about our mission, which has four parts:

• We provide on-the-ground local news reporting to fill the geographic and topical news deserts left by contracting legacy media companies; you can find many of these stories about Bay Area news, arts and culture, demographic trends and history at LocalNewsMatters.org.
• We collaborate and partner with other media, particularly nonprofits; we are working with Solutions Journalism Network, EdSource, CALmatters and others to amplify good and important work.
• We work with journalism schools to train the next generation of reporters by providing paid internships; it’s important to mentor students so they have a professional path toward journalism jobs like I did.
• We experiment with technology; I’m interested in testing new products to gather and distribute news in new ways.

Q: What is the core business in 2019 for your news service and how has it changed from when you began your career at BCN in the late 1980s?

A: What I’d like to do more of is multimedia journalism and regional issue coverage that connects the dots and helps provide context for the daily news that passes across the wire. But a lot of our core business is actually the same as it was when BCN began and when I first worked here. We still provide 24/7 breaking news coverage of the 9-county region from urban hubs to suburban towns, from Silicon Valley to wine country. We still report on a lot of general news — including crime, court decisions, traffic, weather, civic meetings, public events, environmental issues, etc. We still provide an incredibly useful daily calendar of verified events that news organizations might be interested in covering and government/PR agencies use to plan their events.

What’s changed? The pace of news over the last few decades has accelerated so we have to work really hard to stay on top of every fire, shooting, city council decision, election result, court case and traffic accident. The population has also expanded so we have more people to report on as they live, work and play in a more complex region with all the issues related to housing, transportation, jobs, the environment, education and so on. And finally, the geographic scope of our coverage has expanded following the trends of super-commuters and population displacements as the cost of living pushes people into the outer reaches of the region like Monterey, San Benito and San Joaquin counties.

Q: Many news media leaders have competition in their DNA and see BCN as a competitor even as it serves their organizations with tips and short stories? How do you look at the role of BCN in today’s regional news ecosystem?

A: There are too few of us in journalism these days to reinvent the wheel or get too caught up in scooping each other. If we can deliver baseline coverage of important, verified Bay Area news in an efficient and cost-effective way, that allows others to use their resources in different ways. We free up our clients to do more enterprise, more investigative work, more in-depth reporting to make their journalism even more distinct and valuable to their audiences. That’s not competition — that’s a service.

Q: How has being in the center of the digital and social media universe had an impact on BCN? Has it brought new opportunities for your business and added to your subscriber base?

A: Our client base has become much more digital, of course, with every traditional TV, radio and print client adding on websites to extend their brand and range of platforms. The proliferation of online-only news sites has also brought many new clients to us and opens up new avenues for different multimedia products such as photos, videos, maps and such. In a way, we have always been a digital operation so the speed and brevity of that universe is already comfortable for us. We were one of the first to deliver news directly into newsroom computer terminals and one of the first to deliver via a password-protected website.

Because we are B2B, our social feeds are restricted to clients as a convenience, but we do monitor Twitter, Facebook and other social media to stay on top of breaking news and also to watch how our reports are being used by others.

Q: How are subscribers currently using the news service in their changing media worlds? Have your interactions with subscribers caused you to adapt or change your product?

A: Some of our clients feed our stories directly onto their websites in real time. Others pick and choose the ones they want to rebroadcast or republish. Still others build off of our stories to craft their own unique reports. Over time, we have become less of a tip service and more of a news feed so we keep that in mind with the topics we choose and the approaches we use to cover stories. We’ll often post a short alert, for example, followed by a longer story so that we serve our web and broadcast clients with short dispatches and our print subscribers with longer reports.

Other adaptations include adding more photos because everyone needs visuals for their digital platforms and we plan to do more of that. I can also see a role for us in sharing large data sets so our clients can pull from those sources to craft audience-specific reports for their readers. We are extremely transparent with sourcing to the point of sharing phone numbers and emails for the benefit or our clients if they want to follow up for their own stories. We have also in recent months introduced a link to a budget of stories to let subscribers know what we’ll be working on each weekday.

Q: BCN often was used by local media companies as a behind-the-headlines tip service but seldom a content brand they would credit like The Associated Press. Is one of your goals now to change that paradigm and make BCN a more recognizable brand to the general media consuming public in the Bay Area?

A: I often say that Bay City News is the most powerful media company you’ve never heard of because we do not have a consumer-facing product. We deliver our reports to other media, who in turn enhance their brand with broader and more timely coverage than they might otherwise be able to do. I do want to make BCN a more recognizable brand, in part because we are used directly by a lot of clients, especially local news sites that don’t have the bandwidth to re-report stories or cover things outside of their defined geographic niche. We are also doing more enterprise reporting, so a better known brand helps us — and our staff journalists — with sources and credibility. And because we now have the Bay City News Foundation, we want to attract more support for that side of the enterprise as we grow our community coverage and fill the gaps in emerging news deserts.

Q: What steps have you taken to improve accuracy and reliability in news service content?

A: We occasionally make mistakes like everyone else, but our policy is to correct them quickly. We have added staffing to spread the workload so we are less rushed in getting out the news. We require fact-checking of every address, name, date, etc. so that we verify the information that public agencies or other sources sometimes distribute incorrectly. We have hired about a dozen experienced reporters and editors who were laid off in recent rounds of cuts by other media, folks who have spent years covering the Bay Area in deep and meaningful ways and they bring that experience to BCN now. Some are freelancing while others step in to do regular editing shifts and all of them provide outstanding leadership and mentoring for younger reporters who are still learning the ropes.

Q: What do you see as BCN’s role in covering the big issues facing the Bay Area such as transportation, housing, environment and homelessness? And similarly, has its role evolved in how it covers the big regional breaking stories such as the deadly wildfires?

A: I have tall ambitions for work in these areas because the stakes for our region are so high and we must work together to illuminate the problems and solutions that face the Bay Area. We have already sponsored several training sessions for our own staff and other Bay Area journalists on ways to do better, more meaningful journalism that resonates with readers. We won two grants from Solutions Journalism Network to look at voter participation and published those stories on both LocalNewsMatters.org and the BCN newswire.

We are applying for foundation funding to delve deeper into geographic and topical beats. We are hiring staff with proven expertise in areas like economics, the environment and civic coverage so that we can cover those areas well. With reporters in nearly every county seat in the region, we are well poised to connect the dots and provide context for stories that arise. We are also in a position to publish collaborative projects on issues like housing and homelessness so that we can all benefit from the work being done and share the results with readers, listeners and viewers across the region.

Q: Among your stated goals has been to bring more women into media leadership positions. And I know you have worked to help high school journalists in your years as a newspaper editor. Now, as the owner of your own news organization, how are your goals to promote women and develop the next generation of journalists playing out at BCN?

A: I am passionate about giving a new generation of journalists a pathway to a career like the one I have had. Bay City News has a long history of training journalists to write, interview and edit quickly and accurately. In fact, we have seen about 500 journalists come through our ranks since we started in 1979 and I have contacted many of them in the last year to maintain that community. Lots of veteran journalists got their start here and some have stayed for years to develop beats like courts or bureau reporting. That’s an amazing legacy that I want to continue.

As an owner, I can have even greater impact through the hires I make. We have been offering training sessions not only to our staff but to other local journalists. We have committed to paid internships for women and people of color who are not well represented in newsrooms. As we grow, I plan to help them advance in our own organization or in other places where they can pursue public service journalism that matters. In addition, I have intentionally built a network of women advisers to involve smart, accomplished leaders in my enterprise so that I stay true to my values and surround myself with those who believe in the mission.