![]() ![]() She worked on her high school and college newspapers and spent her summers at Bay City News, covering for reporters’ vacations and gaining experience with just about every role, bureau and shift at the news agency. Her parents had subscribed to three daily newspapers and dozens of magazines and watched TV news every night, so Rowlands grew up steeped in awareness of civic life and the importance of having solid information to participate in it. Rowlands, 55, was born and raised in Berkeley, in the pink house she now owns that has become Bay City News headquarters during the pandemic. “We’re trending in the opposite direction of a lot of local news organizations, so that’s exciting,” says Kiley Russell, who’s been a reporter since 1995 and is coming up on his fifth year with Bay City News. She also created a nonprofit foundation with a local news website that reaches out directly to the region’s 8 million residents, and she gave the whole group a tech makeover. ![]() In just three years - and during a global pandemic that forced dozens more news organizations to shutter - she has boosted the number of counties her newswire covers around San Francisco, added reporters, hired the company’s first photo editor and won multiple awards. As part of my entrepreneurial journey, I had to figure out how to do all the business-side stuff in addition to journalism.”īut Rowlands is known for her ingenuity and her exhaustive network, and before long Bay City News was a bright green dot on a map turning brown from so-called news deserts creeping over vast swaths of the country. “They’re focused on the journalism and not the backend of the operation. “There are a lot of small newsrooms just like this, limping along with very old technology and making it work because they have to, but with no capital resources or IT team to help,” Rowlands says. Katherine “Kat” Rowlands in March 2018 on her first day as publisher and owner of Bay City News Service in the San Francisco Bay Area (Photo provided by Rowlands) But the challenge grew as she surveyed the Bay City News newsroom that first day, with its garage-sale atmosphere of decrepit desktop computers, dusty pagers, broken fax machines and cabinets full of yellowing paper files. over the past 15 years as advertisers and subscribers moved to free online options. Declining revenue has forced more than 2,100 newspapers to shut down in the U.S. Rowlands knew it would be daunting to take over a news organization amid an industry-wide crisis. That refrain lingered through the ensuing decades of her career as a journalist - from a reporter and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area to a foreign correspondent in the Netherlands and Honduras - until finally, in March 2018, she walked into the newswire’s Oakland, California, headquarters as its newly minted publisher and sole owner. Katherine Ann “Kat” Rowlands was an eager summer intern for Bay City News Service 35 years ago when, even as a cub reporter shadowing veteran journalists, she remembers thinking, “I bet I could run this place.” ![]()
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