Lenfest Institute announces $150,000 grant to The San Francisco Standard to invest in AI experimentation

The Standard will use ‘Mode 2’ experimentation to create an AI-powered news app to reimagine how audiences interact with local news and information.

February 18, 2026

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism today announced a $150,000 grant to The San Francisco Standard to develop an AI-powered news app designed to reimagine how audiences interact with local information.

The Standard joins the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship, a collective of 10 news organizations exploring how AI can drive business outcomes such as new audiences, new forms of monetization, and scale. Each organization in the Collaborative embeds AI engineers and receives software support from Microsoft and OpenAI. The Collaborative is committed to sharing its case studies and findings with the broader news industry.

The Standard’s project will explore Mode 2 AI strategies, which leverage new interfaces and product formats enabled by advanced generative AI. While Mode 1 AI focuses on optimizing existing workflows and efficiency, Mode 2 emphasizes learning, experimentation, and a shift toward AI-native journalism that can be fine-tuned to user needs.

Over the next year, The Standard will develop and test a mobile interface that moves from static articles and simple chat queries to dynamic interfaces that allow readers to interact with local reporting in real time. Through this partnership, The Lenfest Institute and The Standard hypothesize that AI can unlock new ways to publish and access trusted journalistic content. The project aims to better serve the needs of individual residents and serve as a model for local journalism innovation nationwide.

As part of the project, The Standard will prototype novel product approaches and conduct experiments to deepen audience engagement. Initial tests include:

• Dynamic Information Delivery: Shifting from traditional digital articles to continuous, modular content—including experimenting with a new approach to the content management system (CMS).
• Interactive Archives: Surfacing proprietary archival reporting through natural language queries to provide greater context and enable deeper dives.
• Personalized Obsessions: Tailoring the user experience to highlight the specific storylines and topics readers follow most closely.
• Contextual Geo-targeting: Utilizing location data to deliver relevant, hyperlocal updates in a mobile-first environment.

The Standard’s project team includes Editor-in-Chief Kevin Delaney (co-founder of Quartz and Charter), co-founder and CEO Griffin Gaffney, and Product Design Director Daniel Lee (designer of Quartz’s breakthrough iPhone app). The Standard is partnering with Bit Bit Press, an AI-first publishing platform startup, to design and develop the mobile app.

“The project allows The Standard to engage in deep, ongoing exploration of the news product opportunities unlocked by AI and experiment with the way that our newsroom produces journalism,” said Delaney. “Our desired impact is to invent a new interface for AI-native news that readers love and engage with, prove that such products can drive direct relationships with users and subscription growth, and benefit the broader industry.”

Because Mode 2 strategies are learning-driven, the Institute will share lessons from The Standard’s experiments to provide a blueprint for other local news organizations seeking to compete in a mobile-first world increasingly mediated by AI.

“We’re excited to see our program leading to novel experiments with advanced AI technology,” said Tristan Loper, Lenfest Institute Head of National Programs. “There is an opportunity now to create products that have never been imagined before. We look forward to sharing what we learn with the local news field.”