Bay Area Newspapers

Two Bay Area media powerhouses -- Clarity Media Group (run by Examiner owner Philip Anschutz) and MediaNews Group -- are teaming up to sell newspaper ads locally, across their combined holdings.

Under the plan, potential advertisers can blanket a buy across both the Examiner and MediaNews holdings such as the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune -- 14 papers in all that are delivered to a combined 808,000 daily readers and 900,000 on Sundays. (Those numbers include giveaway copies of the free Examiner.

Clarity described it as a "one-stop advertising buy for clients," featuring reduced rates.

It's a clear push to compete with the Chronicle, which boasts a circulation bigger than any of the papers individually (340,000 weekdays, 807,000 Sundays), but doesn't come close to touching their combined numbers. It's something that MediaNews has been trying to do on its own, but without a holding in San Francisco proper it's had a significant hole in its Bay Area ad coverage.

Also significant, points out the Denver Business Journal, is the fact that Chron parent company Hearst Corp. is a minority owner of Denver-based MediaNews outside the Bay Area, and that MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton might be interested in purchasing the Chronicle if anti-trust issues can be taken care of.

McSweeney's has posted a preview online of its much anticipated newspaper demonstration project. The San Francisco Panorama, as they're calling it, is going will include a 112-page broadsheet, a 112-page magazine, a 116-page book section, a pocket-sized weekend guide, and three pull-out posters.

The newspaper, which goes on sale in San Francisco and around the country at the beginning of December, is a one-shot deal produced by the McSweeney's crew to demonstrate exactly what can be done in print.

"We think that the best chance for newspapers' survival is to do what the internet can't: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible," McSweeney's says on its Web site.

The paper will feature a piece by William Vollmann on gold-mining battles in Imperial County, a story from Afghanistan by J. Macolm Garcia about the recent elections, Jesse Nathan on the effects of unregulated marijuana farms in Mendocino County, as well as the Bay Bridge investigation produced in collaboration with the Public Press and Spot.us.

The 150 writers, artists, and photographers who contributed include both local luminaries and national bold-face names. Among them: Andrew Sean Greer, Nicholson Baker, Roddy Doyle, Art Spiegelman, Michael Chabon, Miranda July, James Franco, Stephen Elliott, Jon Mooallem, Junot Diaz, Peter Orner, and Michelle Tea.

More pix and the background to the project, after the jump.

All images: McSweeneys

continued...

The Wall Street Journal's much anticipated Bay Area edition launches tomorrow, the newspaper said in an announcement. The newspaper will fold Bay Area-specific news into the A-section of the print edition every Thursday, the newspaper says, and has also created a Bay Area-specific section of its Web site at WSJ.com/SF.

The announcement said the paper will provide coverage in a variety of areas, including "local business news, economics, technology, cultural activities, sports, politics and education issues."

While it said the paper will provide "unique insights" for readers, Chief Revenue Officer Michael Rooney also had this to say: "This edition also provides a new platform that helps advertisers target this important audience." The print edition currently reaches 92,000 subscribers with a median household income of more than $154,000.

No word yet on whether the paper's San Francisco bureau will produce the content or whether, like the New York Times, they will be seeking other partners.

Update 1: A WSJ spokeswoman just told us that all editing and reporting will be done by current Journal staff. That's in marked contrast to the Times, whose president and general manager said that the Times was looking for partners to produce the content for the Bay Area edition, because having Times reporters do the reporting and writing "doesn't really fit within our staffing model."

Update 2: Matt Murray, the Journal's deputy managing editor, and Steve Yoder, the Journal's San Francisco bureau chief, will oversee the editorial direction of the print and Web content. And most of the content on the WSJ.com/SF site will be free, since it is general news. Business and finance stories, however, will be subscriber-only.

Complete press release, after the jump.

continued...

First, it was San Jose Mercury News columnist Mike Cassidy reaching out to readers with a how-we're-going-to-survive, state-of-the-newspaper series of columns.

Now, it's publisher Mac Tully (also a VP of the Merc's parent company, Bay Area News Group).

Tully chimed in with a column on Saturday that started by declaring that things are getting better and the recession might finally have found its bottom. Then he launched into a dual-pronged approach of trumpeting the success of the Mercury's plans for revenue generation, and slapping the Chronicle silly.

For the first part, Tully pointed out that readership numbers are indeed down (10 percent for the daily edition, 6 percent on Sundays) over the last six months, but ascribed it to the paper's master plan to eliminate "circulation with low readership," deeply discounted subscription rates and deliveries to some outlying areas. It's essentially the same model recently employed by the Chronicle: cut printing costs while retaining only the most profitable readers.

Still, in a year-over-year comparison, Merc readership was fairly stable. "A massive 624,000 adults will read the Mercury News on a weekday; 673,000 will read us on Sunday, and that number will climb to well over one million over the course of a week as we pick up casual readers," Tully wrote.

He also made sure to point out that while the Bay Area News Group only declined about 5.5 percent and 3.2 percent in daily and Sunday editions, respectively, the Chronicle dived 25.8 percent and 23 percent in those categories.

Then he added this: "Keeping our print readership the same as the prior year . . . at the same time we were consciously reducing low-readership circulation, was a significant achievement for us. That result was not replicated by our neighbor in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Chronicle showed declines in its print audience of 7 percent daily, 11 percent Sunday and even a 3 percent reduction in its integrated online and print audience in the same 11 county market area."

It seems decidedly like a little-brother complex, going to such great lengths to trumpet one's own success while simultaneously pointing out the failings of a rival. Perhaps he just wants to take part, in his own small way, of chumming the water around Fifth and Mission for any sharks that might be circling.

The sentiment rings especially true by the time Tully gets to his closing statements. "I'm often asked whether newspapers are going to make it as an industry," he writes. "The answer is a resounding yes."

He might as well have added, "But not the Chronicle."

Leave it to the SF Weekly to point out craziness within the pages of the Chronicle (or, in this case, SFGate). Not bad craziness -- just coincidental craziness.

It started with a story about hookah bars, which featured in one of its photos a shot of Bulos "Paul" Zumot, owner of Da Hookah Spot in Palo Alto, smoking with his girlfriend, Jennifer Schipsi.

Moments later, the same photo jumped over to a breaking story about a homicide investigation concerning a local hookah-bar owner and his suspiciously dead girlfriend.

Same folks.

From the Weekly's Joe Eskenazi:

At first glance, one would think this was some manner of editing error; the wrong photo being placed next to a breaking news story. But, no: The photo SFGate was already running on its home page just happened to be of the two people in all the world featured in a breaking homicide story.

In a word, this is mind-boggling (yes, that's one word). The odds against this were staggering and the timing is phenomenal. To paraphrase the famed Casablanca line, "Of all the hookah joints in all the world..."

To see the photo in question, click here.

UPDATE: Bronstein issues mea culpa on "borrowing" charges.

San Francisco Chronicle Editor at Large Phil Bronstein stirred it up yesterday, when he all but accused the New York Times of plagiarizing a Chronicle story about Oakland Police Chief Anthony W. Batts for its inaugural Bay Area edition last Friday.

Of concern to him was the fact that the Times story started like this:

Anthony W. Batts was enjoying a successful run as the head of the Long Beach police when a headhunter called last winter and asked if the chief's job in Oakland had any appeal. Mr. Batts said no.

Then, he said, came March 21, when a recently released parolee, Lovelle Mixon, shot and killed four Oakland police officers and cemented the city's reputation as the violent crime capital of the Bay Area.

Sitting at the officers' funeral, Mr. Batts said, he changed his mind. "I decided that I'd like to help," he said.

It was a good lede, though reminiscent of the Chronicle's profile of Batts some two months earlier, which began:

When a headhunter called Long Beach Police Chief Anthony Batts in March and asked him whether he was interested in becoming Oakland's next chief, Batts knew the answer: No.

"I was happy in Long Beach," Batts said during his first public appearance Monday since accepting the chief's job in Oakland.

But everything changed three days later, on March 21: four Oakland police officers were gunned down in the deadliest day for law enforcement in the city. Batts viewed the television coverage.

"I watched the pain and the suffering in the Police Department," he said. "I watched the pain and the suffering in the community as it too hurt at the same time."

After attending the officers' funeral at the Oracle Arena, Batts said he text-messaged the headhunter: "I want to help."

And while it's fair enough to point out that somebody writing an extended feature about a local figure might realistically search the region's largest paper for background material, there's one thing that Bronstein knows all too well: People who are used to being interviewed have fallback stories that they tell over and over again during the course of various conversations. When those stories are compelling, they frequently end up at the front of articles.

Could Bronstein have an axe to pick with the new competition in town? He made a point of failing to mention the name of the Times writer in question (it was bureau chief Jesse McKinley), with an attitude that seems to fall somewhere between superiority and condescension. He also neglected to accuse the Times of actually doing anything improper, which only bolsters the impression that this is nothing more than an attack-dog stance.

Of course, SF Weekly points out that not only did Batts tell the same story to the Chronicle and the Times, but to the Long Beach Press Telegram, as well, which ran its own story a week before the Chronicle's. ("If the Press Telegram's 'editor at large' wrote a bombastic column about the Chron 'borrowing' his paper's material -- well, we missed it," wrote the Weekly's Joe Eskenazi.)

Then again, the Times' advance press for its Bay Area edition promised to cover the region "as only the Times can." At the very least, that much has been proved at least partially false.

"Unfortunately, neither Jesse nor I read the Chron piece he cites," Felicity Barringer, the editor of the Times' Bay Area pages, told the Weekly. "So the good news is, it's hard to borrow something you haven't even read. The bad news is, as an editor, I should have been a little more thorough in my research."

Update: Barringer has pointed us to a release issued by the Times' home office about an hour ago:

The suggestion in Phil Bronstein's blog post that a New York Times reporter improperly borrowed or plagiarized from a San Francisco Chronicle article in a profile of the Oakland police chief is ridiculous.

The chief, in discussing his move to Oakland, explained his decision to our reporter in the same way he described it at the public news conference covered by the Chronicle in August. This is hardly surprising. As commenters on Mr. Bronstein's blog have pointed out, other news organizations had also recounted the same anecdote -- BEFORE the Chronicle article appeared. The fact that the chief has recounted the incident previously certainly does not give one newspaper an exclusive right to these facts.

The Times takes the issue of plagiarism extremely seriously. Even in a competitive news environment, allegations like these should not be made capriciously. But we're glad Mr. Bronstein is reading our new local pages carefully, and with evident concern.

After last month's news that The New York Times planned a regional edition to be published in the Bay Area, yesterday's news told of plans for a similar undertaking in Chicago.

"Our intent is to roll out these expanded reports in several key markets around the country, with Chicago following San Francisco," said Times spokeswoman Diane C. McNulty on the Times' Media Decoder blog. "The details are still being discussed. The idea is to provide additional quality local content for our readers."

The proposed San Francisco edition will consist of two twice-weekly pages of Northern-California-specific news. It will roll out with content being produced by existing Times staff, but will eventually be handled by a local partner -- rumored to be Warren Hellman's Bay Area News Project.

Looks like all those layoffs might actually be paying off.

Improbably, after three years of essentially falling off a cliff, newspapers' fortunes might actually be rebounding. On Tuesday, Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., announced earnings above analysts' forecasts.

Of course, this has partly to do with the fact that analysts didn't expect them to do much other than continue to sink. But still.

Company shares rose $1.76, or 18 percent, to close Tuesday at $11.74. (In March, it traded for less than $2.) Other stocks that were up included those of The New York Times Co. (up 5 percent) and McClatchy Co. (up 6 percent).

Another good sign: ad sales didn't fall quite as sharply as they did in the first two quarters of the year (during which, it must be pointed out, they dropped 33 percent).

More importantly, it says that if a rebound is indeed in the works, with advertising gains for things like cars and jobs, newspapers will be well positioned, what with having slashed staff and wages virtually across the board. (Gannett, for example, has eliminated 5,500 positions since 2007.)

It doesn't do much for the quality of the product, and it doesn't offer a solution for the exodus of readers and advertisers to the Internet, but at the very least it should keep the doors open for a few more months.

Nielsen Online has released its latest numbers, showing how much time people spend per month at top-30 newspaper sites.

The August results weren't good for our hometown offerings.

The clubhouse leader was the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Web site, which clocked in at 20 minutes, 47 seconds per reader.

The Chronicle's SFGate.com, however, managed only seven minutes, one second per user. That's down from more than 16 minutes in August '08.

Only four papers in Nielsen's top-30 ranked lower. One of them, the San Jose Mercury News, came in dead last -- by a longshot -- with only four minutes, 42 seconds per user (which is actually up by two seconds from a year ago). This tells us either that the Star Tribune's Web site is more than four times better than that of the Mercury News, or that people in Silicon Valley have more than four times as many things to do other than read online newspapers as their counterparts in Minnesota.

There is a caveat to SFGate's wide year-over-year swing, however. In June, Nielsen expanded its panel to eight times its previous size, which had a dramatic affect on many rankings. As a result, the company recommends looking only at this year's numbers, and not comparing them to last year.

Nielsen's Top 30
Site -- Aug. '09 (hour:minute:second) -- Aug. '08

NYTimes.com -- 0:13:58 -- 0:29:48
washingtonpost.com -- 0:10:22 -- 0:10:49
Wall Street Journal Online -- 0:14:01 -- 0:13:57
USATODAY.com -- 0:13:32 -- 0:16:20
LA Times -- 0:09:28 -- 0:06:48

Daily News Online Edition -- 0:07:11 -- 0:05:16
Boston.com -- 0:17:26 -- 0:09:09
New York Post -- 0:09:47 -- 0:14:50
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle -- 0:07:01 -- 0:16:37
Chicago Tribune -- 0:11:52 -- 0:07:33

Politico -- 0:07:27 -- 0:10:29
NJ.com -- 0:10:26 -- 0:07:51
The Houston Chronicle -- 0:11:27 -- 0:31:11
Chicago Sun-Times -- 0:08:31 -- 0:08:22
MercuryNews.com -- 0:04:42 -- 0:04:40

Newsday -- 0:08:32 -- 0:04:48
MiamiHerald.com -- 0:10:02 -- 0:03:29
Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- 0:17:31 -- 0:14:08
DallasNews.com - The Dallas Morning News -- 0:10:34 -- 0:04:04
Philly.com -- 0:08:16 -- 0:03:02

Orlando Sentinel -- 0:07:33 -- 0:07:59
Detroit Free Press -- 0:13:35 -- 0:13:33
The Washington Times -- 0:07:05 -- 0:03:05
tampabay.com -- 0:06:47 -- 0:09:08
Star Tribune -- 0:20:47 -- 0:24:47

DenverPost.com -- 0:06:49 -- 0:04:21
The News & Observer -- 0:06:57 -- 0:08:37
Azcentral.com -- 0:15:24 -- 0:12:40
Seattle Times -- 0:15:07 -- 0:07:26
Sun-Sentinel -- 0:09:40 -- 0:06:25

The Danville Weekly is the Bay Area's latest newspaper casualty, having announced that its final print edition will be published on Oct. 2. It will still appear online thereafter.

Embarcadero Media, which owns the Danville Weekly, said in January that certain members in its chain of papers -- which also includes the Palo Alto Weekly, Menlo Park's Almanac, the Mountain View Voice, the Pleasanton Weekly and San Rafael's Pacific Sun -- might go entirely online.

"While it saddens us to discontinue the print version, we believe the future of community news is online," said publisher Gina Channell-Allen in the newspaper's account. "We look forward to continuing our tradition of quality journalism, just delivering it via a different medium. And we are excited about introducing new features that help build a stronger and more interactive community."

(Via the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.)