Kevin Delaney is using AI to revolutionize local journalism, one curated story at a time.
His journalism start-up, The San Francisco Standard, has an office with an airy floor plan more akin to a tech company than a traditional newsroom. That’s by design, since it has embraced AI tools more than most media organizations and in more creative ways.
“San Francisco is a world capital, and it should be seen—and covered—that way,” says Kevin, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Quartz editor in chief who now leads The Standard.
That ambition is driving an experiment in local news: an “AI-first news interface” designed not to replace reporting, but to help readers navigate it in more personal, useful, and dynamic ways.
With a grant from the Lenfest Institute, which receives funding from OpenAI, The Standard moved from contract signing in mid-January to launching the first version of its subscriber app in early April.
A reader opening the app gets an AI-generated briefing shaped by their interests, location, and reading habits. It feels less like a traditional news homepage than a smart, evolving feed: a morning rundown, local recommendations, stories surfaced because of what a reader follows, and even highly specific interests like “Berkeley restaurants” or “ocean swimming.”
The Standard is using AI to turn reporting into interactive modules that let readers go deeper on a story, answer likely follow-up questions, surface notable people in the news, and draw on the publication’s archive and reporting corpus. One module highlighted City Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, whose work The Standard has covered, and included a Q&A on a new bill he sponsored to protect the city’s LGBTQ residents from the effects of out-of-state laws targeting their communities.
It also opens the door to multi-modal journalism, starting with audio briefings. The newsroom is building tools that could let reporters file notes, transcripts, photos, audio, and video into its internal system, where editors can approve them to strengthen the knowledge base behind future coverage and reader experiences.
Subscribers can already submit news tips through the app, with human editors reviewing them before they enter the newsroom’s knowledge base. Over time, Kevin says, that could evolve into a trust system for community contributors: “You have a 5.0 rating on Uber as a rider. Could we build the same thing?” If a reader repeatedly submits accurate tips, future contributions could carry more weight with editors.
The Standard is using ChatGPT, but is not relying on just one AI tool or model. It is testing multiple systems, choosing the best fit for each task. The through line is usefulness, trust, and fidelity to the reporting.
Kevin hopes The Standard can become a model for other media start-ups: journalism rooted in real communities, close to the people and places it covers, and powered by an AI-first approach that makes that reporting more accessible and more relevant.
