San Francisco
Chronicle is Northern
California's largest newspaper, and
one of the largest in the United States, serving primarily the
San Francisco
Bay Area
, but distributed throughout Northern and Central
California, from the Sacramento
area and Emerald
Triangle south to San Luis Obispo County
. It was founded in 1865 as
The Daily
Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers
Charles de Young and
Michael H. de Young.
The paper grew along
with San
Francisco
and was the
largest circulation newspaper on the West Coast of the United
States in 1880; today only the Los
Angeles Times exceeds the Chronicle's circulation
on the West Coast, while the paper is ranked 12th by circulation
nationally.
History
Between
World War II and 1971, new
editor
Scott Newhall took a bold and
somewhat provocative approach to news presentation. Newhall's
Chronicle included investigative reporting by such as
Pierre Salinger, later to play a prominent
role in national politics, and
Paul
Avery, the staffer that pursued the trail of the self-named
"
Zodiac Killer" whose crimes chilled
late-1960s San Francisco. It also featured such colorful columnists
as
Pauline Phillips, who wrote
under the name "
Dear Abby," "Count Marco"
(Marc Spinelli), Stanton Delaplane, Terence O'Flaherty,
Lucius Beebe,
Art
Hoppe,
Charles McCabe, and
Herb Caen. The newspaper grew in
circulation to become the city's largest, overtaking the rival
San Francisco
Examiner. The demise of other San Francisco dailies
through the late 1950s and early 1960s left the
Examiner
and the
Chronicle to battle for circulation and readership
superiority; the competition took a financial toll on both papers
until the summer of 1965, when a merger of sorts created a
Joint Operating Agreement under
which the
Chronicle became the city's sole morning daily
while the
Examiner changed to afternoon publication (which
ultimately led to a declining readership). The two newspapers'
editorial staffs combined to produce a joint Sunday edition, with
the
Examiner publishing the news sections and the Sunday
magazine and the
Chronicle responsible for features. From
1965 on the two papers shared a single classified-advertising
operation. This arrangement stayed in place until the Hearst
Corporation took full control of the
Chronicle.
The de Young family controlled the paper, via the
Chronicle Publishing Company,
until July 27, 2000, when it was sold to
Hearst Communications, Inc., which owned
the
Examiner. Following the sale, the Hearst Corporation
transferred the
Examiner to the Fang family, publisher of
the
San Francisco
Independent and
AsianWeek, along with a $66-million subsidy.
Under the new owners, the
Examiner became a free
tabloid, leaving the
Chronicle as the only
daily
broadsheet newspaper in San
Francisco.
In 1949,
the de Young family founded KRON
(Channel 4),
the Bay Area's third television station. Until the mid
1960s, the station (along with KRON-FM), operated from the basement
of the Chronicle Building, on Mission Street. KRON moved to its
present studios at 1001 Van Ness Avenue (on the former site of St.
Mary's Cathedral, which burned down in 1962). KRON was sold in 1999
and, after years of being San Francisco's
NBC
affiliate, became an independent station in 2002.
Since the Hearst Corporation took ownership in 2000 the Chronicle
has made periodic changes to its organization and design, but on
February 1, 2009, as the newspaper began its 145th year of
publication, the Chronicle's Sunday edition introduced a redesigned
paper featuring a modified logo, new section and page organization,
new features, bolder, colored section-front banners and new
headline and text typography. The frequent bold-faced,
all-capital-letter headlines typical of the Chronicle's front page
were eliminated. Editor Ward Bushee's note heralded the issue as
the start of a "new era" for the Chronicle. On July 6, 2009, the
paper unveiled some alterations to the new design that included yet
newer section fronts and wider use of color photographs and
graphics. In a special section publisher Frank J. Vega described
new, state-of-the-art printing operations enabling the production
of what he termed "A Bolder, Brighter Chronicle." The newer look
was accompanied by a reduction in size of the broadsheet. Such
moves are similar to those made by other prominent American
newspapers such as the
Chicago
Tribune and
Orlando
Sentinel, which in 2008 unveiled radically new designs
even as changing reader demographics and general economic
conditions necessitated physical reductions of the
newspapers.
Staff
As of 2009 the publisher of the
Chronicle is
Frank J. Vega,
the President is Mark Adkins, the executive vice president and
editor is Ward H. Bushee and the editorial page editor is John
Diaz.
Web
The online version of the newspaper, SFGate.com, is led by
President Mark Adkins, vice president Michele Slack and executive
producer Kevin Skaggs. As well as publishing the
San Francisco
Chronicle online, SFGate adds other features not available in
the
print version, such as blogs and
podcasts. SFGate was one of the earliest major market newspaper
websites to be launched, having done so in 1994.
Praise, Criticism & Features
The paper has received the
Pulitzer
Prize on a number of occasions. Despite an illustrious and long
history, the paper's news reportage is not as extensive as in the
past. The current day
Chronicle has followed the trend of
other American newspapers, devoting increasing attention to local
and regional news and cultural and entertainment criticism to the
detriment of the paper's traditionally strong national and
international reportage, though the paper does maintain a
Washington, D.C., bureau. This increased focus on local news is a
response to the competition from other Bay Area newspapers
including the resurrected
San
Francisco Examiner, the
Oakland Tribune, the
Contra Costa Times and the
San Jose Mercury
News.
Lance Williams and
Mark Fainaru-Wada received the
2004 George Polk Award for Sports
Reporting. Fainaru-Wada and Williams were recognized for their work
on uncovering the
BALCO scandal, which linked
San Francisco Giants star
Barry Bonds to performance-enhancing
drugs. While the two above-named reporters broke the news, they are
by no means the only sports writers of note at the Chronicle. The
Chronicle's sports section, called
Sporting Green as it is
printed on green-tinted pages every Sunday, is staffed with two
dozen writers. The section's best-known writers are its columnists:
Bruce Jenkins, Gwenn Knapp, Scott Ostler, and
Ray Ratto.
Another area of note is the architecture column by John King; the
Chronicle is still one of the few American papers to
present a regular column on architectural issues. The paper also
has regular weekly sections devoted to 'Food', 'Home & Garden',
and 'Wine', the latter of which is unique. The
San Francisco
Chronicle Magazine is published on the first Sunday of each
month and regularly focuses on the previously mentioned topics. In
early 2006 a new section, '
96 Hours', was added to the Thursday edition of
the paper, covering entertainment from that day through
Sunday.
Herb Caen
Most
likely the Chronicle's best-known and most widely-quoted writer was
the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb
Caen (1916-1997), a Sacramento native who joined the newspaper in 1938 to write a
local-radio news column. Caen eventually covered city
comings and goings of all kinds—politics, business, and society
both high and low, with some San Francisco history added for good
measure. He moved to the rival
Examiner in 1950 but
returned to what he often called "The Chron" in 1958, where he
remained until retirement.
His column was subtitled "
Baghdad-by-the-Bay" for many
years and later shortened to an eponymous title for the rest of its
existence.
For many years "Herb Caen" was the
only feature on its page (it traditionally shared a section front
with a Macy's
advertisement). For most of his column's history, Caen
somewhat in jest railed against the slang "Frisco", considering it
a demeaning term for the city, and in 1953 wrote a book called
"
Don't Call It Frisco" after a 1918
Examiner news
item of the same name. Caen's view of San Francisco was egalitarian
and eclectic; he made the daily round of restaurants, clubs, bars,
and shops in both the tony and the less elegant quarters of the
city. Among his friends were socialites, artists, business leaders,
politicians, visiting celebrities, and the unknown eking out an
unglamorous existence on the downtown streets—characters equally
prominent on the city's stage in Caen's view.
Caen gave his readers an intimate cross-sectioned look at San
Francisco that few local writers anywhere could offer. Caen also
took a positive, if sometimes bemused, view of those in the
forefront of the convulsive cultural (and counter-cultural) changes
to the city from the 1950s to the 1970s. Frequent observations of
the city's "
beatniks" (a term he coined) and
"
hippies" appeared in his writing, and he
extended the hand of acceptance to those who added to San
Francisco's warmth and color. With tongue-in-cheek he called his
writing "three-dot journalism"; his columns comprised brief items
neatly tied together by ellipses.
His Sunday feature was often a sentimental retrospective of San
Francisco, sometimes comparing the present state of the city with
the 1930s and 1940s—which he celebrated as a halcyon time. Though
he lamented the incursion of freeways, high-rise towers, and chain
stores as a devaluing of his beloved "city on golden hills," he
usually concluded that his adopted home town's beauty and character
was sufficient to withstand any and all changes. From the late
1940s to late 1990s a dozen books of Caen's writing and reflections
were published.
In late 1996, after some protracted absences led readers to inquire
after his whereabouts, Caen disclosed that he was being treated for
lung cancer; after several public
ceremonies and fetes (and after a section of the city's waterfront
Embarcadero was renamed for him) he
retired, passing away on February 1, 1997.
Challenges
Circulation has fallen precipitously since the heyday of the
dot-com boom from 1997 to 2001. The
Chronicle's circulation dropped by 16.6% between 2004 and 2005 to
400,906; in 2006, daily circulation dropped to 373,805. In
response, the newspaper has cut back on local news coverage and
takes many national and international stories from the
Associated Press instead of relying on
Chronicle correspondents. There have also been major
cutbacks in staff, with one fourth of the newsroom being let go in
2007. At the same time, the online edition has continued its growth
and in 2006 SFGate was fifth among U.S. newspaper Web sites with
5.2 million unique users per month.
On February 24, 2009, the Hearst Corporation released a statement
that the
Chronicle's financial position necessitated sharp
and immediate reductions in operating costs. In a joint statement
Frank A. Bennack Jr., Hearst vice chairman and
chief executive, and
Steven R.
Swartz, president of Hearst
Newspapers, said that the paper, with a circulation of 312,000, had
sustained losses in every year since 2001, lost more than $50
million in 2008 and faced an even gloomier 2009. The statement read
in part, "Without the specific changes we are seeking across the
entire Chronicle organization, we will have no choice but to
quickly seek a buyer for The Chronicle or, should a buyer not be
found, to shut the newspaper down." Media reports in late February
speculated that the paper might be required to slash its workforce
by half to remain in business. Hearst recently took the same course
with the
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, and if the
Chronicle is
closed San Francisco would be America's largest city without a
full-service English-language daily newspaper.
On October 26, 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that
the
Chronicle had suffered a 25.8% drop in circulation for
the six-month period ending September 2009, to 251,782 subscribers,
the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper
in the United States. The
Chronicle publisher, Frank Vega,
said in response that the drop was expected as the paper moved to a
business model that focused less on advertising, and hence less on
high numbers of subscribers, and more on increased subscription
fees. The paper claimed that the new strategy had produced
significantly improved financial results.
Publishers
Historical note
The
Zodiac Killer sent his cyphers and
letters to the Chronicle during his murder spree in the late
1960s.
Prices
The Chronicle prices are: $1.00 Daily, $2.00 Sunday.
References
-
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/17/BU4A12VT3I.DTL
- San Francisco Examiner, April 3,
1918. Don't Call It Frisco. Judge Mogan
Rebukes Angeleno for Using Slang in His Petition for Divorce. "No
one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los
Angeles." Retrieved on March 31, 2009.
- New York Times, 24 February 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/business/media/25paper.html
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