Go West, Old Media

Newspaper vendor Rick Gaub waits for customers at his stand in an underground rail station October 26 in San Francisco. Now, he's able to sell local versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The November 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine has a cover story by Richard Rodriguez headlined "Final Edition," which sports the sub-headline, "Twilight of the American Newspaper."

"When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed," Rodriguez writes at the start of his nine-page lament. "If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death (and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary, and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?), it is because San Francisco's sense of itself as a city is perishing."

This is a theme Rodriguez took up in June in an interview with New America Media when he said, "Americans are going to news outlets, not for what news used to provide—the sense of the local, the sense of the parochial, the sense of this place—but rather almost as an escape from place."

Funny thing, then, that two of the country's biggest newspaper publishers are making aggressive inroads to cover that particular place.

In the last month, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have each launched Bay Area editions, hoping to fill the news (and, naturally, the advertising) vacuum opened up by the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that lost 25.8 percent of its readers this year according the Audit Bureau of Circulation (here recounted by Editor & Publisher's Jennifer Saba). Then there's the San Francisco Examiner, which for decades was the afternoon read for the city as part of a joint operating agreement with the Chronicle but has been sold to Philip Anschutz in 2004 and has become, in the words of Rodriguez, "a freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the street twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco municipal buses."

Today, the Journal launches its San Francisco Bay Area edition. In September, Paul Bascobert, chief marketing officer of Dow Jones' Consumer Media Group, explained to the New York Times' Richard Pérez-Peña that San Francisco is a natural fit for the Journal with its "highly educated, internationally minded audience, and our research out there shows there’s a market need for a quality news product."

The first edition relies somewhat on East Coasters' impressions of the city, with a "Bay Voices" interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt, a video about wineries, and an obligatory story on Haight-Ashbury. ("Once a refuge for wealthy San Francisco residents after the 1906 earthquake, the neighborhood—a 20-square-block area just east of the Golden Gate Park—fell into disrepair in the 1960s. Cheap rent helped draw beatniks and students to the area in the late 1960s, culminating in the 1967 Summer of Love when tens of thousands of people converged on the neighborhood, many practicing free love, using drugs, and advocating for the creation of a money-free, utopian society," writes Ryan Knutson, apparently cuing up the Chambers Brothers "The Time Has Come" on the hi-fi.)

The Journal, which just closed its Boston bureau and is ramping up a New York news and culture section, is following in the footsteps of the New York Times, which launched its own San Francisco edition in mid-October.

"At a time when so many news organizations are in a forced retreat, it's exciting to be part of a venture that has set out to build more and better news coverage," Times executive editor Bill Keller said in a Times press release. "And as someone who grew up in the Bay Area, I'm proud that we can play a role in enriching the quality of reporting about the region." The paper's website also hosts a blog called the Bay Area.

Are the Times and the Journal simply moving their daily slap fight to a new sandbox in San Francisco? Maybe, but they also both clearly see an opportunity there to reach wealthy readers in the Bay Area. As a Journal press release (here reprinted by Mediabistro's BayNewser blog) boasts, "The Journal reaches an audience of more than 92,000 readers in the San Francisco market with a median household income of more than $154,000—the most affluent and influential audience in Northern California."

As the Times and the Journal move in, there's a very real risk that San Francisco could lose its hometown daily, the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chron's publisher, Hearst Newspapers, announced in February that the paper lost $50 million in 2008 and could lose more this year, prompting headlines like "Hearst Plans to Slash, Sell or Shut Paper in Bay Area."

In March, the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Sarah Phelan wrote a story headlined "The Chronicle Death Watch" in which she asked, "Is San Francisco really the frontrunner in the race to become the first major U.S. city to go without a major daily?"

Maybe, but it'll have some competition in the race to recycling bin of history: Another Hearst-owned paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer folded in March and as the New York Times Magazine's Michael Sokolove showed in August, Philadelphia's dailies are struggling as well. This week, the Chronicle went glossy (-ish) in an effort to draw in more readers.

So it makes sense that outsiders would see an opportunity in San Francisco—someone has to cover all that news, serve those last remaining readers, and, of course, grab the few advertisers left if the old Chronicle. Well, if the Chronicle, you know, goes to a farm to live with a nice family and other newspapers.

It's not just the big guys from New York moving in to fill this possible hole in San Francisco's newsstands. In September, the nonprofit Bay Area News Project was announced, with funding from F. Warren Hellman and talent from U.C. Berkely's Graduate School of Journalism and reporters from KQED-FM to report on stories of local interest. Then there's an intriguing wild card: McSweeney's, the quarterly literary journal and publishing house launched by Dave Eggers 11 years ago is launching its own newspaper in December, the San Francisco Panorama.

The Panorama, isn't actually a newspaper, but rather a journal designed to emulate a fat, multisection Sunday paper. The publishers' describe it as "an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there."

The Times' Bruce Weber checked out the still-in-development Panorama, which he called "a mammoth project," and wrote, "As the name suggests, the focus will be local—the lead story is an investigative piece about the cost overruns on the reconstruction and retrofitting of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge–but correspondents are weighing in from as far away as Afghanistan and on cultural scenes as un-local as Nascar."

Sounds like a vibrant, engaging newspaper. In other words, exactly what San Francisco needs.