US-based SFGATE is a rare example of an ad-funded local news site which has grown substantially in recent years.
It may help that ‘local’ for SFGATE is California (the world’s fourth largest economy). But with a focus on longer reads and in-depth reporting, it is proof that quality journalism can still thrive on the open web.
In April, it was the 37th most popular news site in America, per Press Gazette’s top-50 ranking, with 27 million visits making it the most popular purely local news website in the US.
Originally launched as The Gate in 1994 by Allen Weiner and John Coate, it became SFGATE in 1998, and was one of the first news sites to offer searchable archives, classified ads and open public forums.
It was free and acted as a portal site for various outlets across the San Francisco Bay Area: serving as the digital home of the San Francisco Chronicle, KRON-TV and the San Francisco Examiner up until the early 2000s, when Hearst acquired both The Chronicle and SFGATE.
In 2013, the Chronicle launched its paywalled website and SFGATE hired 12 staff to create a more robust editorial team focusing on breaking news, as well as acting as a shop-window for paywalled Chronicle content.
When Grant Marek joined as editor in chief in 2019 SFGATE at 21 members of staff. His aim was to restyle the website as a “New York Magazine for the West Coast” focusing on longer form, feature writing providing a point of difference with the more news-focused Chronicle.
He said: “Every year the company asks us for big ideas, and I think we just had one they were really intrigued by.”
The Chronicle and SFGATE became two independent entities with their own editorial staff base and newsrooms. Marek hoped to expand reporting to get writers placed in areas across California, not just San Francisco. It required investment, but he says Hearst was on board right away.
“We completely separated from the Chronicle and became independent newsrooms on different floors of the same building.” Marek’s SFGATE launched with eight verticals spanning everything from local news and politics to food, travel, tech, and culture. Articles range from more hard-hitting coverage of crime and immigration issues to restaurant reviews. The audience is broad – former Californians, current Californians, tourists – anyone with an interest in the Golden State.
Since 2020, SFGATE has steadily expanded its regional coverage – to Lake Tahoe in the east of the state, Disneyland in the south, the Central Coast, Los Angeles and even Hawaii (the Pacific island which is a popular holiday destination for Californians).
Today there are 60 employees and “we’ve never had a layoff,” Marek says with pride. SFGATE is now said to be the most profitable news title run by Hearst (which also runs a huge stable of popular magazine titles).
Filling the local news gaps
Marek – a Californian born and bred – saw an opportunity in providing more local reporting across the state, focusing largely on popular tourist areas. California lost a third of its newspapers between 2005 and 2023, according to a 2023 Northwestern Medill School of Journalism report. “There are a lot of places in [this state] that have lost all of their media outlets,” Marek says.
Rather than trying to cover the entire state from San Francisco, SFGATE has placed reporters and editors directly in the places it’s writing about. Half the newsroom is remote. Once, Marek tracked down a potential employee via Twitter location search.
“We’re not assigning breaking stories to a generalist in San Francisco who’s never been to Tahoe,” Marek says. “We’re hiring someone who lives there and knows what matters to that community.”
Ad-funded model
SFGATE relies almost entirely on advertising – mostly programmatic, but sold at a premium thanks to its niche, often under-covered content and a comparatively wealthy audience. “The fewer outlets covering something, the more value our coverage has from an advertising standpoint,” Marek says.
Adverts appear every four or five paragraphs within stories but the site is not over-burdened with intrusive pop-ups.
Hearst provides support on product development, adding “new bells and whistles” to the site. SFGATE has its own audience, photo, copy and video teams. A small central marketing team run by Hearst in San Francisco serves both SFGATE and The Chronicle.
Marek says the model could be replicated, provided it is grounded in local knowledge. “If you just drop someone in to chase trending stories, it doesn’t work,” he says.
From Disneyland to dumplings
SFGATE’s reporting on land use around US parks has earned mentions from The New York Times, and drives consistent interest from readers both local and national. Since 2019, SFGATE has won awards from the San Francisco Press Club Awards, North American Travel Journalists Association and Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas.
Coverage of California’s national parks is already driving 12% of all site traffic for SFGATE some four months after the new section was launched. Three reporters covering the parks all live in the regions they write about. The Trump administration’s threat to funding for the parks has also raised interest in the coverage..
Marek says SFGATE does not shy away from covering negative stories. “We wrote a story on how expensive Disneyland has become,” he said. “People respond to that because it hits something they care about.”
“The LA Times and the Orange County Register are the only other two outlets covering it. But a lot of it is very friendly coverage, in my opinion, because they have an advertising stake in Disneyland.”
Audience data and feedback are vital. Marek says SFGATE’s audience “over-index on Bay Area Asian readers”. That inspired him to hire a dumpling columnist “because we thought our audience would like it, and they do”. Margot Seeto literally writes a column on different dumpling restaurants across California every quarter. She won best column last year from the San Francisco Press Club for her work.
In 2019, SFGATE started from scratch with its email newsletter offering and has now reached a total subscriber count of over 282,000. Newer newsletters targeting readers in growth areas like Tahoe, the Bay Area or Orange County have subscriber counts in the 15,000 range, whilst The Daily, SFGATE’s biggest newsletter, has 145,000 subscribers.
SFGATE model being replicated elsewhere in the US
SFGATE’s model is already being replicated by Hearst elsewhere – in San Antonio, Houston, Albany and Connecticut. These versions follow the same principle: hire a reporter embedded
Marek isn’t worried about AI-generated answers dampening traffic in the future: “Honestly the [Google] AI Overviews is absolutely killing sites that were gaming the system trying to answer reader queries. We’re just not playing that game.
“We rarely do lists or write content that is trying to answer a Google question. Sites that put a lot of weight into that are hurting tremendously.
“Most of our search traffic is coming from Google Discover. We’re covering so many large funnel topics, and we have long-standing quality SEO as a 31-year-old site. Good journalism can absolutely still work.”
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