Katherine Ann Rowlands '88 is leading a local news renaissance from her own backyard
By Laura Billings Coleman | Macalester Today, Summer 2025
According to the headlines, owning a news organization these days is a losing bet: News readership has been in decline for decades. Newsrooms have shed nearly three-quarters of their workforce since the Great Recession of 2008. More recently, Northwestern University researchers have found that newspapers have been closing or merging at a rate of nearly 2.5 every week, often leaving behind news deserts with little to no local coverage.
But none of that stopped journalist Katherine Ann Rowlands ’88 from making a bid for Bay City News, a wire service near her hometown of Berkeley, California, when it went up for sale in 2018. The regional wire service, which provides news coverage used by broadcast, print, and digital outlets in Northern California, has launched the careers of hundreds of young journalists over nearly fifty years—including Rowlands, who interned there during summers while a Mac student. “I had always imagined how great it would be if I could run the organization or build something like it,” says Rowlands, who used her savings to buy every share of the company and invest in its expansion over the last seven years. “I’m still standing—but it is not for the faint of heart.”
Community journalism has motivated Rowlands, a former Mac Weekly editor who studied political science and journalism with such civic-minded Macalester professors as Chuck Green and Ron Ross. “Journalism to me is fundamentally about being curious and creating a conduit of information that can be useful to people to be informed, make better choices about their lives, hold public officials and government accountable, connect the dots, and make sense of the world,” she says. After spending her junior year at the London School of Economics and then graduating from Mac, Rowlands went straight to Columbia University’s journalism master’s program, which honored her with its Alumni of the Year Award in 2024 for contributions to her field. For more than a decade, she made a living writing and producing news from compass points around the world including the Bay Area, Honduras, the Netherlands, New York, and London for outlets such as The Economist, Newsweek, and niche publications serving international readers.
Back in California, she served in editing and reporting roles around the state through the 2000s, just as newspapers started to struggle with competition from digital venues and decreasing ad and subscription revenues. She found the professional atmosphere discouraging. “Instead of hiring more people and doing more ambitious projects, we were downsizing,” she says. She also had grown frustrated with the dearth of women in decision-making roles in the field. As a past president of the Journalism and Women Symposium, a national network for women in the news business, she knew the talent was available. “There’s so much experience, expertise, and wisdom that was not being well represented at the leadership level. I wanted to figure out: Why is that happening, and how can we change it?”
She was able to seek answers to those questions after winning a prestigious John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University in 2016–17, exploring ways to close the gender gap in journalism. But when she heard Bay City News was for sale, it felt like a sign from the universe. With two adult children out of the house and in college, “It was the right moment in my life to take that risk and to do something more entrepreneurial and mission-driven,” she says. “Learning that it was for sale at this serendipitous moment also allowed me to tap into all the smart people around me at Stanford to figure out how I might be able to do it.”
With support from her network, including an informal advisory board she calls the “Wise Women Council” of female leaders, Rowlands built a hybrid business that focuses on diversifying revenue and growing news coverage. The commercial Bay City News legacy company continues covering big headlines and breaking news for a subscriber base of local TV, radio, and newspaper outlets that use its reporting to supplement their own efforts. Meanwhile, the new nonprofit Bay City News Foundation accepts donations and grants that help fund less lucrative and often overlooked beats such as arts and culture, data and investigative journalism, climate change, equity issues, and contextual stories that tie all these threads together. These stories are published on a free site called Local News Matters: Bay Area. The hybrid structure, she explains, is “allowing us to do a much wider range of coverage than we ever could have done with just one or the other of these enterprises.”
Since launching in 2018, the virtual newsroom Rowlands runs out of the Berkeley home where she grew up now includes about fifty-five staff and freelance editors, reporters, web producers, data journalists, audience engagement staff, and photographers, who together publish more than 10,000 original stories every year. Bay City News and the affiliated Local News Matters site won two national awards from the Local Media Association this spring, for best website and for most innovative use of AI for an election project that made collecting ballot information and results much more efficient for her staff and user-friendly for their readers.
The mission-driven work is what drives her. In addition to preserving daily news coverage for nine million potential readers across thirteen counties in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, Rowlands is also deeply involved in protecting the role reporters play in defending democracy. She’s the current board president of the First Amendment Coalition, a group that recently filed suit in San Francisco federal court to force the disclosure of emails from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
And her organization continues to create pathways for future journalists, supporting ten paid internships every summer so students get the experience and inspiration they need to forge their own paths. “Maybe one of them will come back to buy Bay City News when I’m ready to retire,” Rowlands says.
St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.
