Sorry to see that go

The New York Times has an article by Richard Pérez-Peña about the imminent demise of The San Francisco Chronicle:

Extinction threatens The San Francisco Chronicle, the leading local news source. The Hearst Corporation says the newspaper lost about $1 million a week last year, and it must either sell the paper, close it, or lay off a large part of its already diminished staff. A plunge in advertising revenue has battered American newspapers, but red ink flowed from The Chronicle even in years when profit margins above twenty percent were the industry norm. Media analysts and current and former Hearst executives lay some blame on moves by the company and the previous owners, the de Young family— particularly a damaging 35-year partnership with a smaller paper, The Examiner, whose effects are still felt years after it was dissolved.
But fault also lies with the geography, demographics, competition, and technology that all make the Bay Area perhaps the toughest newspaper market in the country. What is certain is that The Chronicle no longer has anything like the grip it once had on this region. From 2003 to 2008, the paper lost a third of its circulation, among the steepest declines in the industry.
Often dismissed as parochial, The Chronicle has not been a magnet for major awards— it was too idiosyncratic for that— but it has always paid serious attention to subjects that arouse local passions, like gay rights, the environment, and the arts. It is one of a handful of papers with an architecture critic, John King, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist whose predecessor, the late Alan Temko, won a Pulitzer in 1990.
Like the city itself, The Chronicle cherishes whimsical touches, like a sports section that was printed on green paper— and occasionally still is— and front-page feature articles like a recent one about a local fish with strange eyeballs. The paper is best known for columnists with devoted followings, like Leah Garchik and Jon Carroll, whose work is often quirky, personal and resolutely local. The paper's columnist Herb Caen, who died in 1997, was often called the voice of the city.
“The Chronicle reflected the unique culture of the place, which can be like a small town, mostly through its beloved columnists,” said Robert Rosenthal, managing editor from 2002 to 2007. “But I think it’s been in backpedal mode for so long, the constant downsizing, that it has lost some of that.” On any sunny weekend, the long brunch lines outside Dottie’s True Blue Cafe in the Tenderloin district illustrate the printed paper’s shrinking place in city life. People who, a few years ago, would have leafed through The Chronicle while waiting for tables are instead tapping on iPhones and laptops. “People eat through their whole meals texting, e-mailing, where they used to read papers,” said Kurt Abney, owner of Dottie’s. “At the end of the day, we used to have a huge pile of newspapers by the front door that people left behind, but now it’s only a few.”
Though most American newspapers are still profitable, the Internet has eroded circulation and advertising, and it cut first and deepest in the Bay Area, a leader in Internet use and home to sites like Craigslist.
The Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue. But some challenges posed by the region long predate the Internet.
The Bay Area has no real center of gravity, and San Francisco, at the tip of a peninsula, has no inner ring of suburbs. The city has only 760,000 of the region’s more than four million residents. Nearby counties have far bigger populations, with their own economic bases and urban cores in places like San Jose and Oakland, and their own major newspapers.
“The Bay Area has this extraordinary fragmentation,” said Anthea Stratigos, chief executive of Outsell, a media research firm. “It’s a region of microclimates, and the person in Contra Costa County might not care about San Francisco City Hall.”
The Chronicle (weekday circulation 339,000 last year) dominates in San Francisco, but beyond the city it trucks papers long distances to compete with The San Jose Mercury News (224,000) to the south, The Contra Costa Times (181,000) and The Oakland Tribune (92,000) to the east.
“Even in the best years, The Chronicle and The Examiner had one-third of the print revenue in the metropolitan market, unlike other major papers that, in their heyday, had seventy percent,” said Steven Falk, who headed the San Francisco papers’ joint operating agency in the late 1990s, and later was president and publisher of The Chronicle.
A large part of the region’s population migrated from elsewhere. In fact about thirty percent are foreign-born. Alan Mutter became The Chronicle’s managing editor in 1984, arriving from Chicago where, he said, “millions of people are rooted to the area, and even in the suburbs their orientation is to the city.” In the Bay Area, “I was struck that it’s not that way at all.”
The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times have combined circulation in the Bay Area of 183,000, almost as high as in the much larger Los Angeles area. “Maybe they’re looking for something better than the local papers, or just something that’s not local,” said Mr. Mutter, who left newspapers two decades ago and writes a blog on news media, Reflections of a Newsosaur.
In past decades, the rival Examiner was sometimes seen as a more serious paper. But The Chronicle more closely mirrored the city’s irreverent, politically liberal outlook. “Back in the ’50s, when we were tried for obscenity for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, The Chronicle did a very honest, sympathetic job of covering that,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and co-founder of City Lights bookstore, a local landmark.
In the 1970s, The Chronicle published Armistead Maupin’s serial fiction that would become the Tales of the City novels, complete with gay characters, sex and profanity— work that most newspapers would not have touched. Mr. Maupin said, “It was Herb Caen who taught me that hookers and hippies could be interesting characters, even heroic figures.”
For 120 years, the Hearsts owned The Examiner, competing with The Chronicle. In 1965, when the papers had similar circulation, they struck a fateful joint operating agreement, sharing expenses and income. By the late 1990s, The Examiner’s circulation was a quarter of The Chronicle’s.
In 2000, Hearst bought The Chronicle for $660 million, ending the joint operation. Under heavy pressure not to close The Examiner, Hearst turned it over to local owners, along with $66 million in subsidies. The Examiner faded, was sold again, and became a free paper.
The Chronicle purchase coincided with the dot-com crash, followed by recession, so its revenue quickly sank. Hearst says The Chronicle has lost money every year since 2000.
The Chronicle’s newsroom, which had well over five hundred people after the merger, could have fewer than two hundred soon, after proposed layoffs. But executives concede that even with the cuts, it is not clear the paper can make a profit. “I read it every day— I’d hate to go without it,” said Mr. Maupin, who left The Chronicle staff years ago. “But by way of confession, I should add that I read online. I’m part of the problem.”

Rico says it was part of his day every day for twenty or thirty years. No Herb Caen, no Odd Bodkins, no Armistead Maupin? He can't imagine the Bay Area without it...