(Icon of Empty Chair; Man Gone to Lobby)

February 24, 2009 6:21 PM

The San Francisco Chronicle to suffer deep cuts and possibly closure. Noting an acceleration of long-standing losses, Hearst is taking drastic steps with the Chronicle, without (in its announcement, at least) any of the brave promises of perseverance which often accompany such news. Sale or (failing that) closure will ensue if the cuts don't work fast enough. Fallen into bankruptcy in the past two months have been publishers of four major newspapers (LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Minneapolis Star-Tribune) -- but so far none of those papers appears in any risk of folding.
posted by MattD (44 comments total)

If it were at all a decent paper, I'd be really sad. As it is, I see this as journalistic Darwinism.
posted by padraigin at 6:23 PM on February 24, 2009

Ahhh, remember when folding papers referred to oragami swans? Miss those days.
posted by Toekneesan at 6:27 PM on February 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

Well, shit.
posted by brundlefly at 6:27 PM on February 24, 2009

I'm sure what's going to follow is a lot of railing on the Chronicle, but mark me down as someone who enjoys it. The bay area section I think is solid, and I've always liked the sports section. Yeah, I know it's not a stellar paper, but I have a lot of nostalgia about it - it was the paper I grew up with, the paper I learned about reading current events from, and I'll be sad if it folds.
posted by ORthey at 6:28 PM on February 24, 2009 [6 favorites]

...and I'll be sad if it folds.

It always has. It always has.
posted by gman at 6:30 PM on February 24, 2009 [6 favorites]

The Chron is such a sad excuse for a paper. Maybe if they did some real in-depth investigative pieces and just stopped publishing stuff that barely crosses the mark for a blog post people would read it. Plus the owners just don't care.

Valleywag's commentary seems as insightful as any: the paper is allegedly overstaffed, yet produces little interesting journalism plus the parent company is apathetic to it as a property. That's pretty much grounds for closing the doors.

Of course, I only read it Sundays - maybe they put all their in-depth, cutting-edge stuff in the Tuesday paper.

The memo from publisher Frank vega basically saying the paper is up for sale. SFist seems to see it as a union-busting tactic. A smaller staff will not make the paper suck any less IMO.

Disturbingly, this will further San Jose's move to be the true center of the Bay Area. I know, ridiculous, but at least the Mercury has Fry's ads to keep it afloat.
posted by GuyZero at 6:30 PM on February 24, 2009

Same here: nostalgia. Yoda full-page on the front of the pink section while standing in a 3-block-long line to see Empire on opening weekend. Do we blame Hearst for failing to keep it alive?
posted by damehex at 6:32 PM on February 24, 2009

First of all, fuck Hearst. If there's a media machine which needs to die and be written into history, it's that one. Its founder played a large role in getting us into the Spanish American War through his papers, much like Murdoch today. As luck would have it, William Randolph lost control of the paper in the last depression. Made a great film, but, honestly, we'd be better off without that legacy.

But, frankly, having lived in the Bay Area, I'd miss the Examiner less.
posted by krinklyfig at 6:32 PM on February 24, 2009

Well, after living for a year in S.F., I became addicted to Jon Carroll's columns and have been reading them every day for twenty years. Although I have heard recently that columnists write two or three columns a week, he does it every day, with several vacations a year. If they let him go, I will tremble with anger, as I did today when I heard that our school librarian, a year away from retirement, was being cut back to half-days.
posted by kozad at 6:34 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

This reminds me, I've been looking for an article that Im pretty sure I didn't imagine from the Chronicle long ago that featured rejected "little man in the chair" rating drawings, including one where he hung himself. If anyone can find that I'd be thrilled.
posted by ORthey at 6:34 PM on February 24, 2009

The Chron's quality suitably pilloried, what happens to local news? Is it good for SF to be a 1-paper town—and for that paper to be the Examiner (*shudder*)?

Even mediocre papers serve a purpose. So the Chron dies; then what?
posted by wemayfreeze at 6:49 PM on February 24, 2009

Yeah, it may be sub-par, but what are we left with?
posted by brundlefly at 6:55 PM on February 24, 2009

Is it good for SF to be a 1-paper town—and for that paper to be the Examiner (*shudder*)?

Does the Examiner even count?
posted by doctor_negative at 6:59 PM on February 24, 2009

Yeah, it may be sub-par, but what are we left with?

Metafilter.
posted by gman at 7:00 PM on February 24, 2009

Is there a major city that doesn't have a major newspaper? I can't count the Examiner, because it has cartoons on the cover and it is delivered to me free of charge for reasons I can't begin to understand nor solve.

I suppose if any city were able to manage just fine without traditional media, a city in the Bay Area would, but I wonder if any other cities of comparable size/importance already are? And if it matters?

(I am not a "newspapers are dead!" type by any means)
posted by padraigin at 7:04 PM on February 24, 2009

The Examiner definitely doesn't count.

If the Chron closes, I will miss the fishing reports a lot. I am serious.
posted by rtha at 7:11 PM on February 24, 2009

While it hasn't fallen into bankruptcy, EW Scripps put the Rocky Mountain News up for sale in December. Plan B says if the paper isn't purchased, it will be closed. An announcement on the fate of Denver's other daily is due by the end of March. The newspaper covers its own death watch here.
posted by SeeAych4 at 7:11 PM on February 24, 2009

Yeah, the Examiner doesn't count as a major newspaper, but the problem is that, if the Chron dies, the Examiner WILL suddenly count, where it counts. It'll be what gets read, more than it does now. That would be terrible.
posted by wemayfreeze at 7:20 PM on February 24, 2009

The Chron's last major investigative scoop might have been their reports on escalating salaries for University of California executives. Don't expect any similar in-depth reporting from the MediaNews Group, which owns all the other weekly newspapers in the Bay Area from Monterrey to Marin.

I enjoyed the Chron's columnists, dating back to Herb Caen, Stanton Delaplane and Charles McCabe--the likes of which will never pass this way again.
posted by doncoyote at 7:29 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

So Hearst is cutting off metaphorical appendages. Nothing new there.
posted by turgid dahlia at 7:30 PM on February 24, 2009

When I was a kid growing up in Northern California, the Chronicle was what got me into the habit of reading the newspaper. To this day I love the Chronicle icons for movie reviews.

The Seattle P-I is for sale and might be shut down as well. So Seattle will be down to just the Times.

My town's terrible paper, the Austin American Statesman, is also for sale. It is Austin's only daily.
posted by birdherder at 7:35 PM on February 24, 2009

Historically, the Chronicle had some great social columnists, including Herb Caen, inventor of the "three-dot journalism" style, and the always funny even when serious Art Hoppe. It was the starting place for Dear Abby and The Far Side.

There was a column that I've forgotten the name of, which was kind of like the Harper's lists, full of random but really off-the-wall facts.

I probably learned to read as much from the reading the Chronicle as from any children's book.

But like many people, I don't even get a newspaper now. Like phone books and cook books, printed news stories, columnists, and classified ads have been replaced by the Internet, where we expect such things to come for free.

Of course the Chronicle quality is low. All newspapers are bleeding money and cutting like crazy, unavoidably accelerating their own demise.

It is sad, but the world changes, and we move on....
posted by eye of newt at 8:21 PM on February 24, 2009

Apart from the Chron's quality or lack thereof, the fact is that if the Chron closes the single major remaining newspaper in San Francisco will be gone, probably for good. That's not a good thing. There's no other metro area in the US that would be without at least one major newspaper in business.

There will be left in the Bay Area -- what? A handful of more-or-less crappy cookie-cutter Media News Group papers (Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, Mercury News, Marin Independent Journal) all under the same ownership and all a remote shadow of their pre-monopoly selves, and those newspapers also laying off reporters left and right and dying slow deaths? A few free weekly rags (and the free Examiner)?

That's not a healthy development, no matter how you want to look at it. It may be that Hearst brought this upon itself, but it's a development that will be bad for the Bay Area generally. I say that not as a fan of the Chron, but as someone who wants to see the 13th-largest city in the United States have at least one newspaper still publishing.
posted by blucevalo at 8:41 PM on February 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

The off the wall facts column was L.M. Boyd's "Grab Bag", which finally got cancelled due to the growing 'political correctness' seriousness over fun cultural shift of San Francisco over the years.
posted by eye of newt at 8:47 PM on February 24, 2009

I rather like the Chronicle and read it online nearly every day. I would be deeply saddened if it closed. I think I'll go and click some ads on the home page.
posted by fenriq at 8:50 PM on February 24, 2009

Consider spaces between words you read in this sentence. You and I take such spaces for granted. But ancient writing included no spaces between words. Space had to be invented.

A pair of eyeglasses at the time of the American Revolution--all such were important then--cost the equivalent of two or three years' wages.
--L.M.Boyd


Okay, I'll stop my Chronicle nostalgia now.
posted by eye of newt at 9:00 PM on February 24, 2009

I am kind of annoyed that Xeni Jardin got the last laugh.
posted by parmanparman at 9:05 PM on February 24, 2009

Wait - no more pink section on the weekends? I used to live for that on Sunday morning.

Does this mean we're going to start seeing the Little Man sporting an I.V. bag?
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 9:40 PM on February 24, 2009

I've grown to appreciate the Chronicle more and more over the years I've lived here. I'm very sorry to hear this.

The Mercury News, too, has had serious cuts and may be experiencing more.
posted by salvia at 9:50 PM on February 24, 2009

For all the wailing about the quality, it's not like there's anything else out there. The Merc is dying, too. They outsource so much of their news that they don't even have their own movie reviewer anymore.

The Chron always had some great writers, McCabe, Delaplane, and Carroll have been noted above. They also gave Armistead Maupin a leg up by serializing "Tales of the City".
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:53 PM on February 24, 2009

Hearst talks about wanting to sell it. But who in their right mind would want to buy it?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:04 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

I never liked the printed Chronicle, but the SFGate.com site was fantastic and a daily read when I lived there (my wife still visits it every morning for the news). I could see some middle ground happening where there is no longer a printed version, but a smaller staff stays on board to continue SFGate.com.
posted by mathowie at 10:28 PM on February 24, 2009

"That's not a healthy development, no matter how you want to look at it."

No, but it's hardly unprecedented. The paper was lost to Hearst himself the last time we went through something like this.

The problem with the news industry is the same problem with the music industry. Neither one has fully adapted to new business models that a world with the internet requires. Yes, we can lament the loss of a newspaper, but it's all sort of sentimental sounding to me. There will be a way out of this, but the way we get news and the publishers might be a bit different than the way we've been doing it for the last century or so. There is always a place for reporting, even high quality investigative journalism, but there may have to be different ideas regarding how to pay for it. I have all the faith in the world that, if there's a way to make money from it, enough to support it with a bit of profit, someone will eventually put it to action.
posted by krinklyfig at 10:47 PM on February 24, 2009

Historically, the Chronicle....

And Tales of the City. Don't forget that.

Also on the cusp is Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Maybe that's just the way they roll?

I can't imagine it would just close. The closer to that it gets the more of a fire sale the eventual sale (to the Examiner?) will be.

The main thing that the papers on the chopping block have in common is debt -- lots, too much. Reorganization and/or sale can free them of that burden and might actually make the unchanged paper profitable (perhaps not the Chron but you never know).
posted by dhartung at 11:14 PM on February 24, 2009

I was telling some college freshmen today that at one time, there was a beast called an 'evening edition'. At first they didn't believe me that the paper was printed more than once per day.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 12:28 AM on February 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

Tucson Citizen's going down, too, after 180+ years of publishing.

Damn you, craigslist!
posted by mmrtnt at 12:55 AM on February 25, 2009

I starter reading the Chronicle when they had that price war with the Mercury and both papers were selling for a quarter.
posted by ryanrs at 1:02 AM on February 25, 2009

started
posted by ryanrs at 1:03 AM on February 25, 2009

That's too bad. Their "Correct Me If I'm Wrong" podcast was a great source of laughs for me:

DRONE

Anniversaries: Serious Business

Pick up the damn phone!

Cat conspiracy

Sick, demented, perverted, twisted, garbage
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:08 AM on February 25, 2009 [1 favorite]

Remember back when San Francsico had two real papers? Yeah, the Examiner used to be a real paper. Then King Willie Brown worked a deal with Buddy Hearst and swapped stuff all around so the fake-paper Fang family got paid to take the Examiner to avoid anti-trust issues, so that Hearst could buy the Chronicle. The Fangs ran the Fangxaminer into the ground pretty quickly until it because the litter that it is today, although they profited handsomely personally. And now Hearst has run the one real paper the city has into the ground, too.

I'm sure it's all Craigslist's fault.
posted by Nelson at 8:13 AM on February 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

On the plus side, Violet Blue would also be out of a job.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:13 AM on February 25, 2009

Oh- how could I forget this one-- excessive use of the dash!
posted by Dr-Baa at 9:29 AM on February 25, 2009

Okay, one more and I'll stop, I promise. They turned my eyeballs into webcams!
posted by Dr-Baa at 12:31 PM on February 25, 2009

The American Society of Newspapers Editors cancelled its yearly convention this year, for the first time since WWII.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:20 PM on February 28, 2009