How our model will work

News Relay Network will start a newsroom that serves a media-neglected community in San Francisco. Through our experimental and unconventional approach, that audience will have the power to drive coverage, directly affecting what stories we produce. We’ll also invite community members to report stories that are important to them.

We are in the early stages, and learning as we go — including about what people might want from this kind of newsroom.

Our plan, laid out below, is subject to change in response to public feedback.

Listening sessions

Right now, we're meeting with community members in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood to find out whether our newsroom model is a good fit for them. To learn a bit more about this part of the city, skip to the end of the page.

So far, people who are rooted in the community have shown a great deal of interest in our model. Our next step will be to broaden the dialogue by hosting accessible listening sessions that will be open to the public and take place in venues where people already convene. We’ll gather data about the issues the community wants covered and how they would like us to publish and distribute the content, whether online, in print, audio, or other formats. We will document our findings and report back to the community.

Audience-driven from the start

Based on community feedback, we’ll know what topics to initially publish stories about and why. Soon after the newsroom is up and running, we'll create an editorial steering committee made up of engaged residents and people who work in the community. Going forward, this committee will guide our coverage so that we’re always focusing on the issues that resonate with our audience.

Community members are co-creators

Depending on the story, it might be best for our in-house journalists to roll up their sleeves and handle the reporting, or it might make more sense for community members to create the content with our support.

Our staff are highly skilled as editors and managers, and if community members want to report stories, we will train them in Reporting 101 — regardless of whether they have prior experience. We'll welcome residents, shop clerks, retirees, and people who are just curious about their slice of San Francisco. We'll help them focus their story ideas, nail down the facts, and craft narratives that are fair — and we’ll pay them.

Community members write opinion pieces

Newspapers often publish the opinions of well-known experts. We’ll do the same with the opinions of our community’s members. And we’ll always distinguish opinion stories from our other news content.

Scaling up

We don’t envision that the pilot newsroom will grow to cover other areas too — in order to serve this community’s needs, it has to stay focused.

Instead, once our pilot is established, News Relay Network will launch additional newsrooms in other communities. Our long-term vision is of a constellation of small newsrooms, each serving its own community while relaying stories to each other about shared interests.

More about the Tenderloin

This diverse neighborhood is home to people of color, immigrants, low-income families, seniors, and the highest concentration of children in the city.

The Tenderloin is alive with small businesses, art, and activism. Many people are happy and proud to be there. The area also faces challenges, including underinvestment, poverty, homelessness, drug use, and dirty sidewalks and streets.

Most of the community members we've spoken with feel like local and national news outlets misrepresent the Tenderloin, over-emphasizing and distorting its problems while looking past the area's vitality and resilience.

We think they are justified in feeling that way. We hope to bring something different to the public dialogue.