Private investors may be coming to the rescue when it comes to local news sites. In cities such as San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, the Twin Cities and now San Francisco, investors are providing funding for local news site. In San Francisco the project will include a journalism school, public radio station as well as money from an investor to get the web site dedicated to news up and running. Like many cities across the U.S., San Francisco newspapers have cut back drastically on what they are providing when it comes to local news.

According to a recent news article it stated that:

The Bay Area project grew out of meetings among business and civic leaders that were convened by Mr. Hellman, co-founder of the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which is based in San Francisco. For years he watched as the circulation, staff and content of The Chronicle contracted. Early this year, the Hearst Corporation talked for a time about possibly closing the paper, which it said lost more than $50 million last year.

At first, the meetings were brainstorming sessions about how to save The Chronicle, but the mission evolved into supporting local journalism in any form, to pick up some of what newspapers have dropped. The Berkeley journalism school was already headed in a similar direction, building local news sites for specific Bay Area communities.

“Our students are out covering city halls and police and courts, and they rarely see any other reporters,” said Neil Henry, dean of the school.

The Bay Area project will hire its own staff — its size is still unclear — with “a number of well-known local journalists,” Mr. Hellman said. After years of layoffs and buyouts that have cut many newspaper and broadcast news staffs in half, there is a surplus of journalists in need of work and plenty of others who are uneasy about staying with struggling news organizations, he said.

The founders said it was too early to talk specifically about which areas the new site would cover, but they all said they wanted to focus on areas where the established media had pulled back, like investigative work, arts coverage and community-level reporting. Their plan calls for journalists to collaborate across organizations and work in several media at once — which may mean retraining print journalists to do things like shoot and edit video.

It should be interesting to see how the new ventures perform and if they can fill the gap left by newspapers. But can journalism students replace the reporting previously done by seasoned reporters? Only time will tell.

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