The San Francisco Standard gets $150K to build an AI-powered news app
“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.
Delaney previously co-founded the business news site Quartz and has reunited with some of that publication’s product team at the Standard. In the years after Quartz’s launch in 2012, the publication was lauded for leading a wave of “mobile-native journalism” and for its signature mobile app, Quartz Brief. The now-defunct app had a conversational chatbot interface, a novel feature at the time that echoes many of the generative AI chatbots that have become commonplace today.
“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.”