No Ads, Read All About It

The San Francisco Public Press, which runs a news website and publishes a quarterly newspaper, has come up with a unique way to deal with the drop in newspaper ad sales: get rid of them.

The non-profit group, which launched in 2007, decided that instead of paying the bills through advertising, it would use the public radio membership model. It's a small venture, relying mainly on volunteers, some grant money, and a cadre of freelancers. But Lila LaHood, the paper's operations and development director, says the paper is filling a void left by the loss of nearly half the journalism jobs in the Bay Area of the past decade.