Naming Leaders, a Nonprofit News Outlet Takes Shape in San Francisco

A new nonprofit news organization in the San Francisco area began to take shape Thursday, with the announcement that it had hired a top administrator and top editor, and had reached an agreement to supply content to the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.

The Bay Area News Project named as its editor in chief Jonathan Weber, who was the editor and co-founder of The Industry Standard, now defunct, a magazine about technology and business, and was a writer and editor at The Los Angeles Times. The chief executive is Lisa Frazier, a partner in McKinsey and Company, the consulting firm, who has advised several media businesses and was involved in planning the Bay Area project. Since October, The Times has produced a twice-weekly Bay Area edition, but planned all along to find a local partner to take over the writing, editing and photography. In November, the newspaper started a Chicago edition, and from the start most of the work was done by a nonprofit start-up, the Chicago News Cooperative.