In early 2009, San Franciscans faced the very real prospect that theirs could be the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The city’s only remaining broadsheet, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle, was in financial trouble and was slashing its reporting staff. Rumors spread that Hearst was considering letting the 145-year-old newspaper die.

Warren Hellman, a San Francisco investor and philanthropist, told friends he was alarmed by the potential loss of quality news coverage in the Bay Area, and he commissioned McKinsey & Company to evaluate a purchase of The Chronicle. He rejected that plan and decided instead to create a new experiment in nonprofit civic journalism. The Bay Citizen was launched in 2010 with grand ambitions, $5 million in seed money, and a performance by Hellman’s bluegrass band, The Wronglers, with Hellman twanging his banjo.

Then Hellman died unexpectedly, on Dec. 18, at age 77, of complications arising from treatments for leukemia. Now, The Bay Citizen is considering a potential merger, according to people involved in the discussions, a move that could see the publication absorbed by an older but similar nonprofit news organization in Berkeley, and raising questions about whether the founding patron’s vision for a revitalization of Bay Area news reporting can survive him.

The unexpected death of Hellman left The Bay Citizen without its founder and benefactor. In September, the news organization’s founding editor-in-chief, Jonathan Weber, resigned abruptly. In October, the founding chief executive, Lisa Frazier, announced that she would resign in early 2012 for personal reasons. Last week, the interim editor-in-chief, Steve Fainaru, a former Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post, announced that he was resigning to pursue a book project.

In the weeks before Hellman’s death, sources say, he began discussions with a local newspaperman, Phil Bronstein, then a vice president at Hearst Corporation, to take over as chief executive of The Bay Citizen when Frazier stepped down. Her last day on the job is Monday. She declined to comment for this article.

Bronstein, 61, who was editor of The San Francisco Chronicle from 2003 until 2008 (previously he served as the executive editor), is president of the board of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, CIR, another nonprofit journalism group that was founded in 1977. As a board member, Bronstein was involved in the creation of California Watch, a project of CIR, which assembled the largest team of investigative reporters in California. California Watch was formed in 2009 and distributes what it calls high-impact journalism to more than 80 different publications. CIR and California Watch have a combined editorial staff of 27.

Bronstein, according to people familiar with the board’s deliberation, said he would accept the job as Bay Citizen CEO only if it were merged with CIR and California Watch. In December, shortly after Hellman’s death, some board members and Bay Citizen contract partners — including The New York Times, which carries Bay Citizen reporting on Fridays and Sundays in its Bay Area editions — began hearing about the proposed Bay Citizen-CIR merger.

Reached Thursday, Bronstein said he and Hellman had met periodically for years to discuss journalism, including features that Hellman suggested for The Chronicle, like “Rascal of the Week, Crook of the Week, hilarious stuff,” Bronstein said. He said that before founding The Bay Citizen, Hellman was considering making a donation to CIR “at a large level,” and that after The Bay Citizen was started, talks eventually involved a closer working relationship between The Bay Citizen and CIR.