The announcement that the San Francisco Chronicle could be shut down within months should surprise no one.
In March or April 2001, I had lunch with John Oppedahl, then-publisher of the Chronicle, at the M-Point, a restaurant a block away from the news room. I had just returned from an eight year stint as the Chronicle's Washington correspondent during the tumultuous years of the Clinton presidency. Oppedahl was fuming.
"No one (in the newsroom) seems to realize that the Chronicle is burning — and its not just the walls that are on the fire, the floor is burning too," he said. He was upset at various demands for raises and other perks that employees were making — without regard to the disastrous economic plight of the paper.
Oppedahl managed to cut $15 million from the Chronicle's operating budget, but it was not enough: he was soon shown the door. Since then the situation has only deteriorated, and it is a near miracle that Hearst has hung on to the Chronicle this long. The Chronicle has not been a going concern for most of the past decade, and continuing to subsidize it has made absolute no business sense at all.
There are all kinds of structural forces that account for the Chronicle's slide. Its problems have been compounded by its efforts, like those of almost every other newspaper, to attract the elusive "youth" reader. Instead, it may have lost hundreds of thousands of older, more committed readers in the process. The Chronicle also never figured out how to reach all the diverse communities of the Bay Area. Increasingly, it has focused shrinking resources on covering San Francisco, where only a fraction of its readers live — leaving many other Bay Area communities out in the cold.
Whatever the Chronicle's shortcomings, it's especially unfortunate that the region's dominant newspaper should be on life support, fighting for its own survival, at a time of crisis for the state and the nation. The paper should be fighting for our survival as a community and a region that has led the nation in so many arenas — political expression, gay rights, new cuisines, intellectual leadership, great literature, and green ecology.
I worry about my former Chronicle colleagues, many of whom are still able produce high quality reporting. even as the ship sinks. I worry about the future of journalism in one of the great cities of the world. All this is happening as California confronts a budget downturn of nightmarish proportions, with all kinds of real life consequences for individual Californians, and the communities where they live.
A strong, aggressive press is needed to document what is happening in the state, and identify and promote solutions for the mess we're in. Instead, the press is floundering — from the free Daily Planet in Berkeley where I live, to the Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and to local television news. Even KQED FM, the public radio station which is one of the most successful in the country, has laid off talented staffers in recent weeks.
We can only hope that from all of this a new form of journalism will emerge, one that engages readers where it matters most: in their brains.
Well-said, Louis. It felt surprising to me, even though it's been a long time coming. Now it feels like the paper is rolling straight into Singleton's lap. This surely seems a pre-emptive answer to antitrust arguments, ie, a Singleton owned-Chronicle is better than no Chronicle at all. I'm not even sure that's true, but I guess we'll find out.