The Scoop
The San Francisco Standard, that city’s lively and well-funded digital upstart, will introduce a two-tiered metered paywall Thursday, a relatively unusual move among its generation of local news startups and one that mirrors San Francisco’s shifting civic life and a shift in the local news landscape.
The “Standard Membership” will cost $90, and include in-person and virtual events with journalists as well as discounted gym memberships, food tasting events, and other benefits, CEO Griffin Gaffney said, reflecting his view that local businesses that can’t afford to advertise are eager to do swaps.
A “Gold Standard” membership, meanwhile, will stand at $900 a year for something Gaffney described as closer to a social club: The invitation-only tier will include access to a private Rufus Wainwright concert in February, and to a salon dinner with a hot local restaurant, The Morris, and a Napa winery, Brown Estate Wines.
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Ben’s view
The Standard, launched in 2021, arrived a beat later than a generation of nonprofit news outlets that tended to focus largely on state or local politics and often, in keeping with their nonprofit status, saw themselves as serving the urban dispossessed.
The San Francisco outlet, by contrast, sees itself as a West Coast answer to New York Magazine — focused on culture as much as politics, and aimed at an urban upper-middle class who can afford to pay for their news. It’s a for-profit company (if not a profitable one) backed by the venture capitalist Mike Moritz. Moritz has also been a major presence in the city’s political swing away from the left — one that began with the 2022 recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and has continued with the election of Daniel Lurie, a wealthy political outsider, as mayor last month. It’s a moment in which the Bay Area’s frustrated middle class, and its Silicon Valley elite, are looking to a different version of local media.
“We’re building the news company this city deserves — gutsy, smart, and definitely not boring,” Gaffney said. “Our membership is for the important stories everyone will be talking about, plus all the kookiness and power that makes San Francisco unique. We’re the all-access pass to this place, especially the fun, buzzy parts.”
The View From The Competition
The city’s combative alt-media, led by the nonprofit Mission Local, have been highly skeptical of the Standard and of Moritz, whose vision a profile described as “a curtailment of citizen oversight, a return to citywide elections at the expense of neighborhoods and others he deems obstructionists, and an overarching focus that the business of San Francisco is business.”
(In the same profile, Mission Local’s managing editor, Joe Eskenazi, noted that Standard reporters “have never felt their editorial independence to be directly circumscribed, and the paper’s coverage of Moritz’s preferred mayoral candidate, Mark Farrell, has not been deferential.”)
Notable
- Local nonprofit newsrooms are “the most promising development in the troubled world of local journalism,” Margaret Sullivan wrote in the Washington Post in a profile of Texas Tribune co-founder Evan Smith.
- But the non-nonprofit model has taken off, too: The Barbed Wire, a progressive Texas news startup, launched in August as a for-profit operation with the backing of Democratic operative Jeff Rotkoff, Semafor scooped.