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of the SF Chronicle
Hearst vowed to make it great. It isn't happening.
By Amy Linn
To San Francisco newspaper readers, the promise sounded sweet, if perhaps a bit surreal.
Under its new owner, the Hearst Corp., the San Francisco Chronicle was going to become a world-class newspaper.
The promise was a bit surreal for San Franciscans because Hearst had long been the publisher of the city's other paper, the Examiner, a scrappy paper known more for its quirks than its journalism.
Under its prior owners, the Chronicle was considered but a notch above, with news coverage playing second fiddle to oddball features and star columnists like the late Herb Caen. Nickname: The Comical.
Listening to San Franciscans, one might have thought they read their local papers only so they could complain about them.
Yes, San Francisco was ready for a world-class newspaper, as Hearst was promising. Could Hearst deliver?
Eighteen months after Hearst took over the paper, in an expensive and tortuous ownership switch that put the Examiner in the hands of a local family, the Fangs, San Francisco is still waiting, its expectations considerably diminished.
Hearst spent $3 million on a major redesign and new Sunday sections for the Chronicle.
The paper's executive editor, Phil Bronstein, the brash former executive editor at the Examiner and husband to actress Sharon Stone, has dispatched Chronicle reporters to cover the war on terrorism and published some hard-hitting investigative stories.
But the consensus among locals is that the new Chronicle is pretty much the old Chronicle in a new dress.
"They promised they were going to produce a world-class newspaper. They are producing a world-class disgrace," wrote novelist Herbert Gold.
To be fair, the Chronicle's ambitions have been severely waylaid by the collapse of the dot.com boom and a deep recession in the Bay Area. The paper has seen a 20 percent drop in advertising revenues and a 50 percent decline in its help-wanted ads over the past year. Publisher John Oppedahl characterizes the ad slump as the worst in 40 years.
More troubling, though, in light of the paper's ambitions, are its circulation numbers.
In the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2001, the Chronicle's weekday circulation hit 512,042, an increase of about 12 percent from the year before.
Much of that gain appears to have come at the expense of the Examiner, which is sputtering under the Fangs.
But the Chronicle's Sunday circulation is down 5 percent from the prior year, standing at just 523,096. And it was with the Sunday paper that Oppedahl had expected to see real gains, with circulation 20 percent or more that of the weekday edition, in the range of 600,000.
It was through the Sunday paper that the Chronicle had hoped to spearhead a circulation push well out beyond the city, but residents in those areas have been resistant to switching from their local papers.
In response to the sour economy, the Chronicle is now slashing costs. It is in the process of cutting 220 employees through layoffs or buy-outs, and it has trimmed back the Sunday paper.
It has cut back its Sunday magazine from 50 issues per year to 26 while scotching most of its zoned editions and eliminating the stock market and mutual fund listings.
Also gone: eight cartoons from its comics page, including Zippy the Pinhead, to the outrage of fans.
A Sunday book section was also chopped but then revived in response to a write-in campaign from readers, including Gold.
With all the cutbacks, Hearst's promise of turning the Chronicle into a world-class newspaper seems all that much further off.
Quips one editor of the paper: "It's just the same old crap in a new package."
In the near term, the Chronicle's best hope is the widely expected closing of the Examiner under the Fangs, which would leave San Francisco a one-newspaper city and the Chronicle in a stronger position to fend off incursions by neighboring papers, such as the San José Mercury, once the economy recovers.
At the least, the travails of the Examiner are taking some local attention away from those of the Chronicle.
Back in October, Ted Fang was fired as publisher by his mother, Florence, and last Friday she ousted editor Dave Burgin after a year in the post.
Among locals, the sale of the paper to the politically connected Fangs was suspect from the start as an inside deal orchestrated by Mayor Willie Brown.
Hearst initially had hoped to simply close the paper with its purchase of the Chronicle for $660 million, but Brown went to the U.S. Justice Department to block approval of the deal, which required ending a 35-year-old joint operating agreement between the two papers.
Ultimately, Hearst agreed to transfer the Examiner to the Fangs in a complicated arrangement that included a $66 million subsidy to sustain the paper.
While Brown and supporters claimed the deal would ensure that San Francisco would remain a two-newspaper city, critics argued that, even with the subsidy, the Fangs stood no chance of making a go of the paper.
January 16, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Amy Linn is a writer based in Missoula, Montana, and a former reporter for the Chronicle.
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