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looms o'er SF Examiner
Staff splashed in move to free daily. Fang dangle.
The death of the San Francisco Examiner now seems certain, two years after it seemed a foregone conclusion.
It will be an ugly death even for a newspaper, scented of the sordid behind-the scenes skullduggery that would have made for smashing headlines 100 years ago under then-owner William Randolph Hearst.
On Friday, staffers of the city's beleaguered and lately ridiculed afternoon tabloid were called to a 2:30 meeting at which James Fang, son of owner Florence Fang, told the assembled that all but a few were out of work.
Fang, the paper's publisher and editor until fired by his mother in October 2001, was nervous and not particularly expansive, saying simply "it didn't work out," according one reporter, speaking of the deal under which the Fangs took control of the paper.
Severance checks were handed out to 40 people, who were then given an hour to leave the building.
The Examiner, which the Fangs acquired from Hearst more than two years ago, will become a free daily newspaper operated by a skeleton crew of a half-dozen writers and editors and relying on stories from the Fang-owned Independent, a local thrice-weekly shopper.
The Examiner will be available only at retail outlets and newspaper racks around the city.
The sense around San Francisco is that this latest incarnation for the Examiner, one of many, will be its last before it is simply closed or folded entirely into the Independent.
It will be an ignoble but perhaps fitting end for the newspaper that Hearst took over from his father in 1887 and used to launch an empire of newspapers in his mold: opinionated, sensationalistic, and given to horde-mongering for the cause of the moment.
Seventy years ago Hearst was the most powerful newspaper owner in America and easily the most feared.
That the Examiner has survived since its near-death experience two years ago, when Hearst Corp. was hoping to fold it, is a testament to the city's fascination with and tolerance of a long tradition of mediocre newspapering.
That the Examiner may now be dying after huge and concerted efforts to save it is testament to the ingenuity of the complicated deal constructed by Hearst by which it ceded the paper to the Fangs.
It was a deal that critics at the time said ensured the paper's demise, and that should not have been surprising, given the history of the paper and the ambitions of Hearst.
Since 1965, San Francisco's two papers had functioned under a joint operating agreement in which they shared printing facilities and split profits. But Hearst, which had the smaller Examiner, found itself in a position to buy the Chronicle in 1999 and made an offer of $660 million.
Initially, Hearst announced that it would close the Examiner if no buyers came forth, and it was preparing to do so until various factions in this very fractious city, including Mayor Willie Brown, stepped forth to object, in one case filing suit in federal court.
In part what made Hearst's offer to sell paper seem disingenuous was that it included only the paper's name and subscriber list. Any buyer would have to buy presses and delivery trucks and build a facility for the paper, a prohibitive expense.
Hearst was clearly interested in using the Chronicle to expand into the farther suburbs without having the Examiner to tussle within the city, where it was still strong.
In early 2000, under pressure from the Justice Department, Hearst sweetened its offer to sell by adding printing presses and trucks to the deal.
Then just two months later Hearst announced that it had reached a deal to turn the paper over to the Fang family, a local publishing family with powerful political connections, in a deal in which Hearst would subsidize operation of the Examiner with payments of $66.7 million over three years.
San Franciscans hooted.
Few thought the Fangs could make a success of the venture, having no daily experience, and it was not lost on San Franciscans that the Fangs' political connections, as a powerful voice in the Asian community, were key to the deal. A deal that pleased Brown's City Hall was going to get okayed, no matter the practicality. And so the deal was approved shortly after by a federal judge.
The outcome was what many expected. When the new Examiner debuted in November 2000, it seemed a very blotched and amateur effort, with typos throughout.
Shortly after top editors began leaving, and in January Florence fired her son as editor and publisher.
At its near death, ironically, the Examiner was distributing some 50,000 issues per day, or about the number the paper was distributing 100-some years earlier when Hearst took over the paper from his father.
February 24, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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