NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO — The Man Who Killed Newspapers is nursing an afternoon tea at the Blue Bottle Café, less than a block away from the imperilled San Francisco Chronicle. There are free papers here, but nobody is reading them — they hang neglected on a rack in the corner, a testament to their sagging fortunes.
The 144-year-old daily Chronicle is bleeding $1-million a week, and if it doesn't make major cuts, its owner, Hearst Corp., has threatened to shut it down. This would confer upon San Francisco an ignominious distinction: It would become the first major North American city without a major newspaper.
San Francisco is accustomed to firsts, but usually they are more hopeful ones: It's where hippies congregated for the Summer of Love, where students spearheaded anti-Vietnam rallies and where Harvey Milk became the first openly gay political candidate elected to office.
All of this has made it a perfect incubator for media, be it the old (legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst used the San Francisco Examiner as a base to build his sprawling newspaper empire) or the new (Google, with its burgeoning news engine, and Craigslist, the leader in online classifieds).
If journalism is failing here, in one of the United States' most engaged and educated constituencies, it is an ominous sign. For more than a century, newspapers have functioned as a civic conscience, instrumental in promoting democratic ideals, whether by checking corruption, fostering accountability or simply informing the public.
The question posed by the Chronicle's potential demise isn't merely whether the quality of journalism will erode in lockstep with the print industry, but whether the bevy of online surrogates that have sprung up can muster the resources and the reach to carry on that tradition.
And for all of that, Phil Bronstein, sipping his tea at the Blue Bottle, is willing to shoulder the blame. At least some of it.
Mr. Bronstein is the former managing editor of both the Chronicle and the Examiner (which was converted to a slimmed-down, free paper years ago). With dark eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a linebacker's build, he enjoyed an illustrious career in journalism as an editor and as a foreign correspondent, although he is more widely known as the ex-husband of actress Sharon Stone (yes, hard as it is to imagine now, there was a time in which newspaper editors enjoyed a measure of celebrity).
Last week, Mr. Bronstein posted an entry on his blog titled "Newspaper disaster? It's all my fault. I'm the one."
Facetious? Of course. But with a kernel of sincerity.
"I'm certainly engaging in hyperbole to say that it was only me. But I figured somebody needed to take responsibility. And it's not untrue that, like a lot of editors at that time, I should have really seen the scope of this much more," conceded Mr. Bronstein, who is now editor-at-large of the Chronicle and an executive vice-president at Hearst, which purchased the paper in 2000.
"I had some advantages. Will Hearst was my publisher, and he is extraordinarily tech-savvy. I had geography to my advantage, and we had one of the first Web-based newspaper sites, SFExaminer.com. So the pieces were in place."
Yet, even with these advantages, the Chronicle — a publication that counted Mark Twain among its earliest scribes and once boasted the highest circulation west of the Mississippi — never fully appreciated the scale of the disruption the Internet would unleash. Although Hearst and one of the paper's unions reached a tentative compromise this week to forestall the paper's demise, it had already halved its staff, meaning that if it does emerge from this recent brush with failure, it will probably do so in a much-enfeebled incarnation.
This plot line is becoming all too familiar. Newspapers were already battling long-term trends such as dwindling circulation and the migration of advertisers to online competitors. Then came along the worst recession in decades, depriving newsrooms of the time they need to figure out a new model.
Witness the carnage of the past few months. In Canada, every major newspaper company (including The Globe and Mail) has undertaken significant layoffs in the past year and the Halifax Daily News has folded.
In Colorado, the Rocky Mountain News, Denver's No. 2 paper, closed abruptly at the end of last month. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst title, will be closed or moved online if the company cannot find a buyer. Major publishers in Philadelphia and Minneapolis have been forced to seek bankruptcy protection from creditors.
The Boston-based Christian Science Monitor has abandoned its print operations entirely, while papers in Detroit are publishing print copies only a few days a week. And several newspapers in Ohio, New York and Maryland have created content-sharing agreements in a desperate attempt to defray costs.
The newspaper death watch has become something of a national parlour game south of the border: There is a website of that name that gleefully roll-calls the industry dead under an R.I.P. banner. A few days ago, Time magazine ran a piece that listed the 10 major U.S. papers most likely to abandon their print operations next.
Other media are suffering in the current economy, from satellite radio such as Sirius XM (which even Howard Stern cannot seem to save) to local TV news operations in countless markets. But none arouse as much emotion as newspapers, with their long histories and inextricable links to free speech and inquiry.
Until now, their travails may have seemed abstract to many readers. Yet, as the corpses begin to pile up, the discussion surrounding the social costs of the industry's decline has gained a new urgency — and San Francisco is now at the locus of it.
"It's awful for democracy to have major newspapers going out of business left and right," said Nathan Ballard, the press strategist for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. (Mr. Newsom himself was on the HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher last month lamenting the possible disappearance of the Chronicle, even though, he said, he often disagrees with the paper.)
"The blogosphere is full of people with opinions, but the facts have to come from somewhere. If the Chronicle were to close its doors, all of this would be gone," Mr. Ballard continued. "It's very important to the city's identity — it's as much a part of who we are as the Golden Gate Bridge."
Blown chances
Newspapers share the culpability here. One misstep Mr. Bronstein can pinpoint was what happened in the mid-1990s when he arranged a meeting between the Examiner's tech department and a Bay Area computer whiz in his early 40s named Craig Newmark, who was brimming with ideas about the ways online media would transform traditional advertising models.
The tech department ultimately shrugged Mr. Newmark off, figuring it could do better itself. That spurned geek went on to create Craigslist, which would suck away one of newspapers' steadiest sources of income. It's a glaring example of how the industry has stumbled in the Internet age.
"They were like, 'Nah, we're going to kick his ass,'" Mr. Bronstein recalled. "Well guess what? A hundred million dollars later, we didn't."
"They tried to work a deal with us that probably would have worked," shrugged Mr. Newmark, a soft-spoken and unassuming man who is nevertheless among the most recognized names in the Internet business, alongside Bill Gates, Google's Sergey Bryn and Larry Page or Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "I mean, who knows? But we should have chatted more."
Over coffee in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the epicentre of 1960s activism, Mr. Newmark insisted that online media are a democratizing force in their own right, something President Barack Obama's administration has tapped him to help harness. Yet he acknowledged that user-generated content comes with its own set of worrying baggage — a lack of trust, credibility and accuracy, to name a few. Newspapers or no newspapers, he said, he does worry about the health of journalism in general.
Many online news sources, such as the popular Huffington Post, have a parasitic relationship with newspapers, either linking to their content or using it as a springboard for analysis, commentary and criticism. Almost all lack the heft to do in-depth projects across a wide range of fields.
"What matters is to preserve journalism jobs," Mr. Newmark said, "particularly in investigative reporting."
But can journalism truly be saved if newspapers are not?
Not all papers will die, of course. Some may come out of the economic downturn stronger than ever. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post all have developed well-resourced, well-regarded online operations that enable them to significantly expand their audience.
They have the time, money and the institutional framework — reporters, contacts, editors and libel lawyers — that allow them to continue to take on major investigative projects. So far online players haven't come close to matching those kinds of resources.
Yet in places such as San Francisco, the picture is much murkier. As papers cinch their belts, there are fewer reporters to devote to investigative projects, and even to cover city hall, the state legislature or Washington.
Pew Research's Project for Excellence in Journalism recently completed a study on the Washington press corps and found that only about 300 papers now have a bureau in the capital, down from more than 600 in 1985. The Tribune Co., which has declared bankruptcy, now has 35 reporters stationed there for its seven papers, down from 95 when the papers were staffed at peak levels.
Hearst, which owns the Chronicle and more than a dozen other papers, now has fewer than half the reporters in Washington than ClimateWire, an online newsletter focusing on environmental policy.
Media observers say the drop in coverage has already resulted in less scrutiny of state leaders in Washington — especially since state representatives won't attract the same level of interest from national players.
Yet no one can really quantify the impact of reduced investigative work: It's impossible to know what is being missed.
"It means that more things will happen in the dark," said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. "Certainly the Web made certain things more available than they have ever been before, at a lower cost. But availability is not the same as exposure. I don't think there's enough of a protection of democratic accountability."
The link between accountability and reach lies at the heart of the newspaper debate. Although online content can be easily accessed and shared, its audience is highly fragmented: It lacks the "mass" element of mass media, making it harder for single stories to generate the impact they might in a city paper.
Several recent studies have borne out this link. One, co-written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor James Snyder and David Stromberg of Stockholm University, found that congressional representatives who are less covered by the local press, mainly papers, aren't as responsive to their communities: They are less likely to stand witness in congressional hearings or to vote against their parties.
More importantly, they found that federal spending is reduced in areas where there is less coverage of the local member of congress. (Similar studies have shown that federal assistance during the Great Depression went disproportionately to counties that had higher radio penetration.)
And in India, researchers have found that aid tended to flow more freely to areas where newspaper circulation was the highest.
There is a wide range in the quality of newspaper journalism, but when papers do their jobs well, it is this sense of accountability — the ability to check the power of politicians and business leaders — that supporters highlight as one of the industry's biggest strengths.
Sense of place
There are other virtues, embedded in the very look and feel of communities, that observers worry are also in danger of disappearing. Aurora Wallace, a newspaper historian at New York University, has studied the role papers play in cultivating a sense of place.
Architecture critics have been instrumental in how cities choose building designs and plan urban development. The late Herb Caen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chronicle — and the closest thing to a demi-god in San Francisco — is credited with helping to spur the demolition of the elevated level of the Embarcadero freeway, which he considered an eyesore that blocked the view of the Bay. Similarly, New York's Newsday was a major booster of the creation of Levittown, the country's first suburb.
Ms. Wallace also pointed out that newspaper organizations themselves were instrumental in affecting their environments. Early newspaper buildings dominated the southern Manhattan skyline a century ago, as tangible reminders of the power of the pen.
Likewise, the iconic Chicago Tribune Tower anchors that city's architectural showcase the Magnificent Mile. It was built in 1925 after the newspaper sponsored a competition to design "the most beautiful and eye-catching building in the world."
And of course there is Times Square, which was renamed after The New York Times when the paper moved its headquarters there in 1904. "The fact that every year we go there on New Year's Eve to watch a ball drop is completely an invention of The New York Times," said Ms. Wallace, who is working on a book called Media Capital: New York Newspapers from Park Row to Times Square.
"The role that a news organization plays in developing a place, and a sense of community, is very important. And it can't be easily overtaken by bloggers for obvious reasons."
This is not to imply that citizen journalism cannot be a powerful force or that bloggers and their ilk can't train useful scrutiny on the media itself. But despite the obvious potential for activism and grassroots movements, the fractured world of the Internet has yet to prove itself as a replacement for the reliable, day-in, day-out reporting of daily papers, Ms. Wallace said.
She said she fears that the mere act of changing consumption patterns — reading a newspaper online instead of physically picking up a copy — will result in a loss for readers.
"Not to be overly nostalgic, but the paper form does something that online doesn't do," she said. When you pick up a paper, "you're going to find things serendipitously that you didn't necessarily know you'd be interested in until you saw it."
At the hub
But nostalgia won't do much for newspapers at this point. If there's any doubt the news model has changed and changed for good, drive an hour south of San Francisco toward San Jose. There, next to the freeway, squats the sprawling campus of Google Inc., one of the other great disruptors of traditional media businesses.
Google, seemingly impervious to the economic plunge, is a beehive of activity. Cars are double-parked in the parking lot, where valets are in charge of managing traffic. The juice bar slings free carrot-and-wheatgrass smoothies to workers on their breaks. Although it is only 10 years old, the world's dominant search engine has presided over what it sees as a fundamental shift in the way people want to consume information.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Google News. Launched in 2002 by an engineer who wanted an easy way to follow the coverage of 9/11 from newspapers around the world, it is now one of the biggest aggregation hubs on the Web, collecting headlines from around the world on various subjects and organizing them into a news buffet for viewers.
Its sudden rise has cut both ways for the newspaper industry, illustrating the uneasy co-dependency between old media and new. When Google users click on a headline, they will be whisked to the newspaper site that generated the story, allowing the paper to gather new readers who might not visit otherwise. According to this logic, every newspaper potentially can claim a global audience.
But to avail itself of that traffic, and pump up the clicks for advertising dollars, newspapers made a fateful decision to make their content free — something many industry observers have since labelled "the original sin."
Google, meanwhile, is attracting ad dollars to its search function, creating even more competition for slim online revenue.
Yet Josh Cohen, the business-product manager for Google News, framed his company's incursion into the news market in a positive light: Newspapers may be suffering, but overall news consumption is way, way up. "There is so much discussion about the death of newspapers that it oftentimes obscures the fact that news is more popular than ever. It's just that consumption patterns have changed significantly," Mr. Cohen said in a conversation in a meeting room, a whiteboard-lined space full of algorithm graffiti.
Google's strategy is twofold, he confided. First, it wants to find a way to personalize news feeds. Second, it wants to make more money from every click, which can, in turn, benefit newspapers. The company is now building algorithms that will allow it to pool local news on its site.
But if local news outlets such as the Chronicle disappear because of their failing financial health, Google will lose a large chunk of its lifeblood. The success of Google News, the great disruptor, ironically depends upon newspapers continuing to produce good journalism. If original content dies, there will be nothing to aggregate.
"There's no doubt that as an aggregator and as a search engine, we are absolutely dependent on great content on the Web," Mr. Cohen said. "If there's not high-quality content on the Web, whether it's news or just Web-content in general, that's not good."
Another choice
Newspapers, of course, can be guilty of bias or lethargy or a failure to cover stories adequately. What Randy Shaw hears in the death rattle of old media is Darwinism at work — an outmoded and deficient form of communication is being replaced by a better one.
In 2004, Mr. Shaw, a San Francisco lawyer, started BeyondChron, a website he bills as San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News. He considers himself an activist, not a journalist, and he devised the idea in response to a growing frustration with the Chronicle.
He felt the paper was doing a poor job of covering issues such as rent control and tenant rights, and had a tendency toward slanted coverage — a conviction that deepened after he worked on the failed mayoral campaign of Matt Gonzalez, whom he believes the paper treated unfairly.
"This is a city that's become more affluent, but it's also progressive still," he said. "But you have a newspaper that is not at all progressive — it insults progressives. If we don't cover certain stories, then no one covers them."
As for the Chronicle's struggles, he added: "I just don't sense people are tearing their hair out. No one said to me, 'Gee, aren't you really sad about this?' "
Yet even he would admit that there is a notable lack of interest some days in the civic issues that BeyondChron covers — he knows that people inside city hall read him most days, but beyond that he's not sure.
Others, such as Lydia Chavez, are also scrambling to fill the local news vacuum, and are discovering it isn't easy to get traction in the fragmented world of the Internet.
Ms. Chavez, a professor of journalism at Berkeley, is a former reporter for Time Magazine and The New York Times, and she has spent the past several months figuring out how to provide quality local news, including investigative journalism, to small communities. She works out of a tiny, creaky-floored office crammed with books and files, often until late in the evening.
Using money from the Ford Foundation, Berkeley is studying whether hyper-local news sites can flourish, and potentially help to counter diminished coverage by papers. The experiment so far is called MissionLocal.org, a Petri dish of micro news in San Francisco's Mission district, an area of town that spans many demographics from working class Latinos to the young, wealthy engineers working for Google.
Ms. Chavez has got the business school involved to help with the model, but she's still not sure if it will work. Although there have been some encouraging signs, demand thus far is anemic. "We got going in October, we were getting great content up there, and then I looked at the Google numbers and I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, this is so sad.' We had 100 hits a day in October. Sad, really, for the amount of work."
This has been the Achilles heel of journalism on the Web — finding a way to subsidize journalism on vital issues and doing so in a way that can impact a large audience. There are alternative voices springing up such as ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative outfit financed by a wealthy benefactor and studded with a couple of dozen reporters, some of them Pulitzer Prize winners.
Yet the website is still dependent on mainstream media such as the Times and the Post and even broadcast networks to disseminate its scoops.
Likewise, GlobalPost has emerged to fill the void in foreign journalism, depending on a "community of top correspondents." It is also a non-profit, and depends on a mix of ad dollars, content syndication and paid membership.
While these could lay the foundation for a new approach to newsgathering, they are not equipped to replace the eroding newspaper journalism in hundreds of towns and cities across North America.
The rapid deterioration of the economy has made this problem even more pressing. Newspapers are failing faster than online players can stem the breach, making it even more crucial that the industry find a model capable of sustaining its traditional brand of reporting, Mr. Bronstein said.
"I have friends who are starting, or have started, independent news websites, who will argue that we all have our heads up our ass imagining that the world will end when we go away because they are going to fill the void," he said. "We'll see. I'm not saying it's not possible … but wherever is the first major city to have one dominant paper disappear, let's see how the bloggers do."
In her book-lined office at Berkeley, Ms. Chavez clings to some cautious hope for a breakthrough. The hits on MissionLocal climbed to between 700 and 800 visitors a day after the website added Spanish-language content. And it has managed to publish three investigative pieces that have resulted in far more traffic.
Yet if the Chronicle were to disappear, she said, she is not sure how online media would take up the slack. "Maybe you'll have 12 hyper-local sites in San Francisco that somehow work with one another, but there has to be an economic model for that — and there is not one yet," she conceded.
"I think you already have elected officials getting away with close to murder, and I think you would have even more of that. There is no oversight whatsoever. It would be awful — I can't imagine."
Sinclair Stewart is the New York bureau chief for Report on Business. Grant Robertson is the media reporter for The Globe and Mail.
© The Globe and Mail
