What we do here and why

This week, SFBay celebrates six months as a grain of rice stuck in the teeth of the Bay Area media marketplace.

We’re damn proud of being that grain of rice, and even prouder of the indigestion we hope SFBay can blossom into. If we don’t get spit out and stepped on first.

If we were blind squirrels in the nut business, we’d have a better chance of succeeding than most startups.

As it stands, here at SFBay, well, we’re nuts alright.

We’re nuts about a lot of things. Bay Area news? Yeah. Original content? For sure. SFBay has penned dozens of original stories in our first six months, with plans for tons more.

We’re nuts for things you, our reader, might not have the time to grab from the 120 or so websites our editors check every single day.

Our team of paid editors — not robots — select and write the stories we publish on SFBay. We have editors working on original and aggregated content most days around the clock to deliver what you see here.

All stories are edited and published through a formal real-time process. As a rule, no work on SFBay is self-published.

Our goal is to provide efficient, engaging, appropriately fun summaries or compilations of material surrounding a given source article. Our editors work within a set of guidelines:

• All of our stories are freshly-written and designed to integrate material from numerous sources. There is no copy and pasting of other people’s writing permitted at SFBay. We do not rewrite entire stories.
•  All of our source material is either from the cited original provider or from the inline links provided in every story. We actively seek related content for stories and aggressively link to supplemental original sources.
• Quoted matter, when necessary, is generally limited to direct interview quotes from sources cited in the original source article. In these cases, the introduction to the quote should make it clear which news organization is being credited for the direct interview quote.
• All images appear on SFBay because we have sought and received explicit, specific permission of the original copyright holder to republish their image, with their desired attribution, or an image is being used via a Creative Commons commercial license with attribution. No images here are hustled, manipulated or screwed with in any way, whether to circumvent copyright or anything else. Images used on SFBay are intended to be part of the editorial presentation and not merely decoration.

SFBay is attempting to disrupt the Bay Area media marketplace from the bottom up. We’ve got more tools up our sleeves before it’s done, and look forward to sharing an exciting journey with our supportive followers and new friends along the way.

You can help support SFBay by making us a part of your regular Bay Area media experience. Let us know how we’re doing, and if you like us, please buy a sticker or some SFBay gear to help spread the word and support SFBay.

Without a formal external marketing budget, SFBay relies upon you, our readers, to let the rest of the world — or at least your own social networks — know about SFBay and give us a chance as we get off the ground. Follow us at Facebook.com/SFBay or on Twitter @sfbay.

Thanks to everybody for all the support and to the SFBay team for what each of them does, so well, each and every day.

SFBay.ca. All Bay, All Day!

Jesse Garnier

Jesse Garnier is the editor and founder of SFBay. A Mission District native, he also teaches journalism as associate professor at San Francisco State University.