Add The California Post on Google A San Francisco news outlet is shutting down after nearly a decade in business after its funding dried up.
The Frisc — an independent nonprofit publication focused on San Francisco — will cease operations at the end of September after running out of money to keep publishing, founder Alex Lash told the San Francisco Standard.
“We have pretty much run out of money,” Lash told the outlet, revealing that he’s even paying for the publication’s farewell party out of his own pocket.
The publication launched in 2017 after Lash and fellow journalists Anthony Lazarus and Barry Owen, along with designer Jeremy LaCroix, saw what they believed was a hole in San Francisco’s local news coverage.
Over the next nine years, The Frisc published hundreds of stories and gave early assignments and jobs to young reporters breaking into the city’s journalism scene.
Its coverage initially centered heavily on San Francisco’s housing crisis before expanding into issues including homelessness, shrinking public school enrollment, public transportation and street safety.
Lash left his job as national biotech editor at digital media company Xconomy in 2019 to run the publication full time.
Funding became harder to secure in 2025 as The Frisc relied on donations for years, Lash told The Standard.
He believes competition for a limited pool of nonprofit journalism funding intensified after federal support for public radio stations like KQED ended, with more donor money flowing to public media organizations.
The Frisc also struggled to carve out a clearly defined place in San Francisco’s increasingly crowded local media landscape.
The publication stopped endorsing political candidates after becoming a nonprofit but continued to champion denser, more affordable housing and policies to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
Lash resisted placing a firm political label on the publication but acknowledged that its outlook could broadly be described as “urbanist.”
“If people think that that belief in more housing and a denser city is a YIMBY thing, we can’t stop them from putting labels on us,” he told The Standard.
The closure comes as San Francisco has seen a rise in local news organizations in recent years, with The Frisc folding as it neared its 10th anniversary.
Senior editor Lisa Plachy, who joined The Frisc in 2024 while attending UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, told The Standard the shutdown left her deeply saddened for the publication and its team.
The outlet also endured a major loss in 2020, when co-founder Owen died of pancreatic cancer. Lash credited Owen with encouraging The Frisc to balance its coverage of the city’s problems with stories celebrating San Francisco and its public spaces.
Lazarus stepped away from the project in 2024 and has since left journalism.
Meanwhile, Lash plans to take several weeks off following the closure before beginning his search for another journalism job.
“In the best of times, nonprofit media is no easy lift,” Lash wrote in announcing the closure Wednesday. “These are not the best of times.”
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