A Conversation about The Chronicle

On last Tuesday's St. Patrick's Day, the Society of Professional Journalists held a panel discussion about the future of The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, which is supposedly on the brink of collapse.



The mostly very smart panel was huge, and included local publishers, editors, union reps, journalism professors, and a few people involved with internet journalism startups.



Management from The Chronicle were notable for their complete absence from the affair, which made me feel sorry for Chronicle union rep and reporter Carl Hall (above) who was receiving the brunt of the audience's pent-up hatred and disgust for the Chronicle's lousy journalism over the decades. Louis Freedberg, pictured behind him, is a former editorial writer and columnist for the Chronicle and he offered the most idiotic comment of the evening.



"Why didn't somebody tell us they weren't satisfied with what we were offering at the paper?" he plaintively asked, and everybody in the audience looked at each other in dumbfounded amazement.



Management at the newspaper has been so arrogant and clueless for so long, with its top-down hierarchical style, that Delfin Vigil (above), a current cultural writer for The Chronicle, just paid for a large ad in the rival "San Francisco Examiner" free daily to take management to task.



The only person who seemed to be rooting for The Chronicle to survive was Bruce Brugmann (above), who has published the "alternate paper" Bay Guardian for forty years. Though the weekly free paper is assertively leftist in tone, its hypocrisy in breaking a unionizing attempt in the late 1970s and its overuse of unpaid intern labor is haunting the rag into irrelevance.



I was at this event taking photos at the request of Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig (above) who has just been hired as the editor of The Public Press (click here), an attempt at an internet newspaper run as a nonprofit, which isn't quite ready for prime time if its poorly designed website featuring my microscopic photos is any indication.



I'm not sure the nonprofit, funded-by-grants model is all that better than the capitalist model. What's the difference between the assertive capitalist Warren Hellman owning The Chronicle (in which he's interested) or funding a "nonprofit" journal through grants? In either case, he's going to be in control.



There is a fascinating post by David Cay Johnston at the Columbia Journalism Review (click here) which trashes the self-serving non-coverage of The Chronicle's financial problems by The Chronicle itself. It also goes into detail about how management is probably trying to come up with a new Bay Area monopoly with Dean Singleton's conglomerate of local newspapers, and how they are going to do everything they can to break the newspaper unions, including the Teamsters, which should be interesting.



In the Comments section of that CJR post, there's a brilliant and sad obituary for The Chronicle by Bill Mandel, who was a writer for the old "San Francisco Examiner" for 18 years. It's worth quoting a large chunk:

"Pre-Hearst (that is, pre-2000), The Chronicle, with its JOA-mandated morning monopoly, was fat, lazy, arrogant, and an interesting literary (but not journalistic) read. Hearst brought the old Examiner's journalistic superiority over when it bought The Chron, but incessant layoffs and news budget cutbacks since 2000 have simply made The Chronicle a bad newspaper, period. Even its popular website, sfgate.com, has deteriorated in the last couple of years.

San Francisco, that shining intellectual city on many hills, is now somewhat puzzlingly surrounded by uniformly horrible newspapers, from the once-mighty Mercury-News in the south to the dreary Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune to the east to the absolutely execrable Marin Independent-Journal and Santa Rosa Depressed Democrat to the north. That's why you see lots of blue New York Times bags outside so many homes these mornings."

"The Chronicle will be missed, but not today's Chronicle. A Chronicle worth missing already died long ago. Whether Singleton, Hearst, or some new hybrid owns what's left will be of interest to business people, but not to readers. The amazing thing is that in this horrible, crushing climate of greed and corporate duplicity, journalists and photographers are still struggling to do their jobs and get the truth out, backed up by nothing but their dedication. Hats off to them."

Find the Hidden Black People at SFMOMA

Two wonderful new murals have been commissioned from the artist Kerry James Marshall for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art atrium (click here).



The style of the murals, depicting Presidents Washington and Jefferson at their Mt. Vernon and Monticello estates, is deliberately and amusingly paint-by-number with a nod to the "Highlights for Kids" magazine with their "hidden picture" puzzles.



The ironic point of the murals seems to be that these iconic scenes were filled with black slaves who did all the work, and if you look closely enough, the previously unrepresented workers who created the estates are to be seen everywhere.



There are other ironies abounding which were probably not intended by the artist and the museum, such as the fact that there weren't any living and breathing black people in the museum as far as I could see on a Monday afternoon.



Their absence was bizarrely appropriate, seeing that the museum is situated on Third Street, which is the main drag of the mostly black Bayview/Hunter's Point but which becomes progressively whiter as it nears Market Street.



Mayor Newsom has recently proposed that Third Street receive a name change to Willie Brown Jr. Street. The former mayor Brown, whose gentrification policies were responsible for some of the most egregious examples of black people removal in San Francisco, lives next door to the museum at a luxury condominium tower.



As my friend Patrick Vaz pointed out, San Francisco's habit of naming major streets after hack 19th century politicians such as Fillmore, Pierce, Polk, Harrison, Buchanan and Clay is finally being updated for the 21st century for our own hack politicos.



The paid labor that created the murals came from 11 staff artists from Precita Eyes Murals in the Mission District (click here). According to Jessica Baca, "Many of the people who come from Precita Eyes Muralists are of various backgrounds and heritages," which is all well and good but there wasn't much evidence of darker-skinned people on the crew helping the black artist, which seemed rather odd.



The 53-year-old Kerry James Marshall grew up in South Central Los Angeles and was the first person in his family to even think about going to college. He ended up being an art professor himself at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has a long and interesting career in the art world. (Click here for a fascinating interview with the artist by Charles Rowell.) You don't have to pay admission to see the murals in the lobby, so check them out, and decide for yourself which ironies are intentional and which ones are accidental.

Oscar Wilde on St. Paddy's Day

A lone gentleman was flying a kite on Civic Center Plaza at the end of the day Tuesday.



In a surreal touch, the kite was decorated with a picture of the famous Irish writer and gay martyr Oscar Wilde.



I asked the kite flyer if he was featuring Oscar for Saint Patrick's Day and he replied, "Yes, indeed."

A Recession Silver Lining

Amtrak's daily Coast Starlight travels in both directions from Seattle to Los Angeles, and in the thirty years I've been taking it, the train has never arrived at its scheduled time. However, in the last month, I've hopped onboard the Coast Starlight in Oakland twice to visit family in San Luis Obispo, and on both occasions the train has not only been on time but has arrived at my destination thirty minutes early.



"What's up?" I asked one of the conductors. "Has the world spun off its regular axis?" He replied that the reason the Amtrak schedule has always been screwed up was because Union Pacific freight trains had first priority on all the tracks while Amtrak trains had to sit and wait for the freight to go through, which has always been a ridiculous state of affairs.



"Union Pacific has cut back their traffic by about sixty percent," the conductor said, which is probably an exaggeration (click here for an AP Transportation article and here for a Fort-Worth Star telegram about the company), but the current disastrous economy is definitely having an effect on rail freight which is good news for those who long for a more reliable passenger train network.



So if you've recently been thrown to the curb by your employer, consider a long train trip where you can share lovely meals with Taiwanese stewardesses on a cheap holiday.