The Lenfest Institute is giving The San Francisco Standard a $150,000 grant as part of its ongoing AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program. The local publication, which launched in 2021, will use the funding to develop a mobile news app with a host of AI-powered features.
The grant is just the latest distributed by Lenfest, a nonprofit organization focused on building innovative and sustainable business models for local news. In 2024, Lenfest launched the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, which was backed by $10 million from OpenAI and Microsoft. The initial 10-newsroom cohort included The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Minnesota Star Tribune, and Chicago Public Media, among others. While these publications submitted specific project proposals, the grants were primarily used to embed AI fellows within each participating newsroom. These first grants were also largely focused on improving efficiency in editorial pipelines and business processes, according to Jim Friedlich, executive director and CEO of The Lenfest Institute.
This new grant for The San Francisco Standard will add an eleventh newsroom to the program as part of a new emphasis on reader-facing AI experimentation.“The San Francisco Standard grant builds upon the foundation of all of this work, adding a focus on more fundamental changes to the user experience,” Friedlich said.
More specifically, the grant will be used to fund the Standard’s work developing a mobile news app with several AI-powered features. Among them will be an experimental content management system (CMS) based on the ideas of structured journalism.
“[This] new approach to the content management system [treats] data and chunks of reporting, not just articles, as the atomic unit,” said Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief of the Standard. Delaney joined the publication in June 2025 after the future-of-work publication he co-founded, Charter, was acquired by the Standard. Delaney describes the CMS experiment as a move away from traditional news stories and towards “modular fresh content.”
The app will also use algorithmic personalization to surface stories and topics in the app that readers care most about, whether that be city housing policy or the latest 49ers score. Using mobile location data, the app will also push out hyperlocal news updates, which Delaney says could include neighborhood crime reports or notices about construction on a reader’s commute. The Standard is also developing an interactive archive that will provide readers with instant background context on the news, using AI on the backend without requiring users to “prompt their way to answers.”
“Our goals are to invent an interface for AI-native news that readers love and engage with daily, prove that such products can drive direct relationships with users and subscription growth, and openly share learnings that benefit the broader local news industry,” said Delaney.
Lenfest’s grant will go towards funding the Standard’s product team working on the project, but also help the newsroom bring in outside technical expertise. The Standard is partnering with a new AI publishing startup — Bit Bit Press — to shoulder some of the mobile app development.
“We believe an AI-native approach can address challenges that have constrained local journalism,” said Delaney, framing the Standard’s project in terms similar to Quartz’s “mobile-native” journalism. “We expect AI to shape both how our journalists report and how readers experience the product — from contextual answers drawn from our reporting to personalized feeds and notifications.”
This story has been updated to clarify the focus of the original Lenfest Institute grants.
