The San Francisco Standard is diving headfirst into AI, thanks to a new $150,000 grant and collaboration with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
The partnership was announced on Wednesday by the institute, which supports local newsrooms with grant funding, training programs, and tech development. Lenfest’s mission is to create “sustainable solutions” and best practices that journalists can grow and share amid rapid shifts in the industry.
The Standard joins 10 other news organizations, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, ProPublica, and the Seattle Times, in the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program.
The Standard launched in 2021, with primary funding from billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz. The newsroom currently has 63 people on staff, led by editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney.
Griffin Gaffney, the co-founder and current CEO of the Standard, declined to elaborate to Gazetteer SF about his views on AI and journalism or any potential examples of how the publication might implement AI. He instead pointed to Lenfest Institute’s announcement, which states that the Standard will be pursuing AI on a variety of fronts.
Initial tests include the use of dynamic modular content instead of static online articles, interactive archives that use AI language models to make searching easier, and the use of geographic location data to deliver hyper-local content to readers. Many of the features will come via a new AI-powered mobile app for the Standard.
In the announcement, Delaney noted that the collaboration with the Lenfest Institute will generate “deep, ongoing exploration” of AI in journalism.
“Our desired impact is to invent a new interface for AI-native news that readers love and engage with, prove that such products can drive direct relationships with users and subscription growth, and benefit the broader industry,” Delaney said.
The Lenfest Institute was founded in 2016 by cable television magnate H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, who donated $20 million and his sole ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer to create the nonprofit (it continues to own the Inquirer today). It has since given millions of dollars to a swath of newsrooms across America, and in 2024 launched the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, a partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI.
With “hundreds of millions of users” already using AI daily to seek information and breaking news, it has become important for newsrooms to consider AI, or risk having to give ground to “third-party technology providers,” Lenfest Institute executive director and CEO Jim Friedlich told Gazetteer in an email.
“We believe it is important for news organizations who specialize in independent, well-vetted, high-quality journalism to provide these services rather than see users rely purely on chatbots,” Friedlich said.
The Standard received the $150,000 grant and partnership because it has the “engineering capabilities” to create new AI journalism tools; the grant includes a clause that the Standard must share findings and innovations to other organizations in the news industry, according to Friedlich. The Standard has already dabbled in AI, using it to create illustrations and even a chatbot to dig into the city charter.
AI implementation remains a hotly debated subject among journalists, with some newsrooms (like Gazetteer) choosing to remain AI-free, while others pursue AI features to address shifts in readership and trends in media consumption, especially the increased use of tools like ChatGPT and algorithm-fueled social media by consumers to find information.
Some newsrooms, such as Ohio’s The Plain Dealer, have gone so far as to remove writing from reporters’ jobs, instead having them rely on an “AI rewrite specialist” to create drafts from notes and interviews. Editor Chris Quinn wrote in a Feb. 14 article that the shift has freed up more time for reporting, adding that rejecting AI in news media will “seriously handicap” journalists in the future.
After two years of running the AI collaborative, however, Friedlich remains optimistic of how newsrooms big and small can control emergent technology to benefit, rather than damage, the skills of journalists and future of the industry.
“The work has been high-impact, highly replicable, and applicable across multiple areas of the business and practice of journalism,” Friedlich said.
