At Bay City News, we believe in a culture of experimentation and adaptation and aim to serve our readers and partners with journalism rooted in the principles of accuracy, transparency and audience trust. This means that we don’t shy away from the changing world around us; we embrace it, learn from it and adapt to it.
In pursuit of those goals, we are developing Bay City News Labs as the entrepreneurial growth arm of our enterprise, including AI projects and other experiments with technology that help our news industry with research, workflow and delivery of news that matters. Bay City News Labs is a designated space for experimentation, shared learning, and exploration of new ways of producing and sharing content that serves our audience in ways beyond traditional news reporting.
BAY CITY NEWS AND AI
The soft launch of Bay City News Labs, started in 2024, has so far involved seven AI projects that were tested and published on our free site, LocalNewsMatters.org. The foundational document was an AI use policy that has been held up as an industry standard for local newsrooms. From there, we explored the use of AI for cartooning; photo enhancement; election data retrieval plus code creation to build scrapers and user-facing dashboards; agents for testing the conversion of structured data into news briefs; agent-led Internet scraping for calendar creation; conversion of original text into new formats like audio; and using prompts effectively so AI can serve as a proxy for news selection. Some of these experiments worked and are helping us build revenue-generating products and workflow efficiencies; some were not good enough to use outside of our sandbox space; all were published and accompanied by playbooks or narratives so others could learn from our work.
Local journalism faces many challenges… Bay City News Labs offers a solution.
In the age of rapid technological development, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, local news needs to adapt to meet an ever evolving array of new challenges and audience needs.
The perfect storm
Local news is already in decline.
Nearly 40% of newspapers are gone. Legacy outlets areshrinking. Startups face hurdles.
AI is accelerating the collapse.
Zero-click searches are at 60%. Publisher traffic is down33%. AI Overviews are driving drops of up to 80%. Weare losing control of our own content even as originaljournalism becomes more valuable.
But trust in local news is high.
74% of the public trust local news organizations. Thedemand is there — we just need to survive thetransition. So building capacity to experiment, sharewins, and find a path to sustainability is critical now.
40%
of US newspapers have closed since 2005
210+
counties are now classified as news deserts
60%
of Google searches end without a click
33%
decline in Google search traffic to publishers
A few of the projects from Bay City News Labs so far:
As technology changes, journalism must change with it. How we gather information and report it, and how we sustain our operations is fundamentally changing with artificial intelligence. Bay City News Labs is the innovation arm of Bay City News Foundation. Its aim is to test new technologies, including AI tools, to help the news industry with research, workflow and delivery of news that matters- and to do so in a way which offers insight and transparency to readers who may be hesitant to trust these tools and the products that come from them. Here are a few examples of how we have done that so far:
Bridging the Trust Gap
At their core, generative AI models predict the next word, not verify that it is true. Journalists working with these tools need to do so transparently and in a way that validates that information we put out into the world has our stamp of approval. Our approach to AI has reporters engage with these tools and technologies in a sandbox of content that gives them a chance to play, test and explore without risking the integrity of our work at large. Then, alongside the results of that work, we publish honest reviews of the technology and experience from these reporters.
Bridging the Efficiency Gap
AI tools can help journalists cover more areas, including documenting and keeping track of public meetings, collating voting results across many government bodies and making it faster to plow through documents.
We are innovating in this space to explore how our human journalists can be more efficient at finding potential stories, and leading us to more investigative work in the name of the public good while remaining ethical and true to the core values of journalism.
Bridging the Monetization Gap
AI summaries of current events challenge the very foundation of the business model that has grown up around the Open Web. The current model relies on clicks and page views, users letting us know who they are, and directly funding news outlets. If readers no longer click through, and AI agents scrape and summarize the news, this model is in doubt.
Our work explores new ways to fund journalism in this new environment.
Who we are at Bay City News Labs
Kat Rowlands
Executive Director
Chloe Lee Rowlands
Tech & Data Manager
Aly Brown
Grants Manager & Reporter
Ciara Zavala
Impact & Digital Product Manager
Ryan Nakashima
Board Secretary & Tech Advisor
