New York Times

There was a lot of grumbling, of course, when the New York Times announced it was going to start a Bay Area edition. (Interestingly, not so much about the Wall Street Journal.) But now comes the Virginia Quarterly Review with an incisive assessment of the venture a month after its launch. And, unfortunately, it's not laudatory. In fact, if we were closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving, we'd be reaching for metaphors involving lumps of coal.

The core problem, says VQR, or, rather, San Francisco-based writer Michael Lukas, is that the Bay Area section "acts like a foreign desk, treating the region like a surprisingly cosmopolitan colonial outpost, covering perennial stories that Bay Area residents have long known about."

"To the newspaper's many east coast readers," Lukas says, "the Bay Area is little more than a far-flung province at the other end of the country, a great place to vacation, drink some wine, have a mud bath. But this is not, of course, how Bay Area residents see their home."

He ends, though, on a charitable note: "Granted, The New York Times' Bay Area section is still finding its footing.... If the Times is going to beat out the Journal in the race to dismember the Chron and the Merc, it's going to have to start reporting on the Bay Area from the inside."

Looks like the twice-weekly Bay Area Report is not going to be the New York Times' only offering around here. The paper just launched a new blog, called "The Bay Area."

"We will point to interesting stories in The New York Times," writes Michelle Quinn in the inaugural post. "We will also highlight local news and information from regional media, bloggers, student publications and Twitter. We will report news live from meetings, public gatherings and other events."

Quinn, a former writer for the San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, who is identified as The Bay Area's lead blogger, says the blog will cover the nine counties of the Bay Area, "from Mountain View to Mt. Tam to Mt. Hamilton, Pleasanton to Palo Alto to Petaluma, San Jose to San Rafael to San Pablo, Fremont to Fairfield to the Farallones."

Also slated to contribute to the blog: Felicity Barringer, longtime NYT staffer and editor of the Times' Bay Area pages; Jesse McKinley, the Times' San Francisco bureau chief; Gerry Shih, who started at the Times as an intern this summer after graduating from Stanford; and Malia Wollan, a Times freelancer and a University of California, Berkeley j-school grad.

The blog is also apparently seeking to be interactive: "Readers are encouraged to participate in the conversation by making comments, forwarding links and submitting eyewitness accounts, photographs or video of news events," says the "About" section.

You've got to give Phil Bronstein credit.

The New York Times smacked down the allegations the San Francisco Chronicle's editor-at-large made in his SFGate column yesterday. Bronstein had suggested a story in last Friday's inaugural edition of the Bay Area Report, the Times' new Bay Area edition, had basically borrowed its lede from a comparable story that had appeared in the Chronicle a couple of months ago.

How did Bronstein respond?

He didn't ignore them. He didn't try to pretend it never happened. He didn't even try to stick to his guns and argue the point further. He's just published a giant mea culpa in the Huffington Post. HuffPost, mind you, not some SFGate Comments backwater, nor even in an emailed press release. He's 'fessed up front and center on the Interwebs.

"Today, the NYTimes slaps me down," Bronstein writes. "Fair enough. I consider that a privilege, given the source. It was a lot more fiery in the SFGate comments section."

It is a rough and tumble online world out there. Kudos to Bronstein for rolling with the punches.

Of course, once can't help but notice that Bronstein couldn't resist pressing home his larger point: "Times, don't ignore all the good things I said in the post just because you're the paper of record and you can—I expect a lot for $900-plus a year. Like a lead story in a news section that hasn't shown up, in very similar form (or, in the case of the Long Beach Post-Telegram, in different form) everywhere else."

Related Story: Not Behind the Times; Bronstein Alleges the NY Times' Bay Area Edition has Done . . . Well, Something

The New York Times rolled out its first Bay Area editions on Friday and Sunday, generating significant local attention for just a few pages of content, two days per week.

Currently, the Times' daily Bay Area circulation is reported to be 40,080; on Sundays it's 57,514. That's in comparison to about 350,000 for the Chronicle, about 600,000 for Bay Area News Group publications (including the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times) and the free Examiner (between about 75,000 and about 250,000, depending on the day of the week).

Editor & Publisher went straight to the source to find out exactly what kind of impact this will have on the local landscape, gathering opinions from Bay Area newspaper editors on what some see as a savior and others feel is a menace.

Some quotes from the story:

The Wall Street Journal just posted a Dow Jones Newswires article on the new New York Times and WSJ Bay Area editions, saying the two are moving "to fill a void in local news coverage left over by shrinking metro dailies."

"[E]xecutives from both publishers have said their continued investment in newsgathering operations throughout the economic downturn would position them to steal market share from local newspapers around the country that are in dire financial straits," the story says.

The Times' edition launched today. The WSJ story says the WSJ edition will launch before year-end.

Interestingly, the Journal's assessment seems at odds with what Times president and general manager Scott Heekin-Canedy told PaidContent in a post published yesterday. About the fact that some might see the ventures "as competition for already faltering area papers like the [San Francisco] Chronicle," Heekin-Canedy said, "[W]e're very sensitive to that consideration. In our view, historically all of the evidence shows we're a supplement to, not a substitute for, the local paper."

Editor & Publisher takes the stance that the Times' new edition "does not seem to scare newspaper editors in the area."

"They have 10 people covering a very large, competitive area. We have a full staff much larger than that covering the area," E&P quotes Chronicle editor Ward Bushee as saying. "All it means to us is that there is a lot more competition, which is a good thing. I welcome it."

It also quotes Mac Tully, vice president of the Bay Area news Group, which includes the San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune as saying: "I wouldn't say it is a threat.... But this is a competitive market and this will elevate the level of competition. It just makes everyone work harder. You have to."

The New York Times' Bay Area edition is out and is, for the moment anyway, being reported in-house. The four prominent features are:

We're thinking the New York Times needs to get its story straight.

The subscription page for the Times' new Bay Area edition, which launches today, promises that readers will get "local stories as only The Times can report them." (Emphasis ours. See screenshot below.)

But at the same time, Times President and General Manager Scott Heekin-Canedy tells PaidContent that, in fact, the Gray Lady would like to find an outside organization to actually supply the content.

"Our preference is to find a local partner to produce this," Heekin-Canedy said. "This doesn't really fit within our staffing model, our staffing resources for the New York Times newsroom."

So which is it? Local content as only the Times can report it? Or local content as only the Times can hire outsiders to report it?

As an addendum, Heekin-Canedy refused to say that the Times' local content partner will be the Bay Area News Project, the new $5 million, Warren Hellman-funded, joint KQED-University of California, Berkeley project to launch a nonprofit news organization. Reports have said that the BANP had been talking with the Times about being their print outlet.

"We're in discussions with a number of people in the Bay Area," Heekin-Canedy tells PaidContent. "We're not at the stage where we're willing to make commitments."

The rumors are about to become official: starting this Friday, Oct. 16, The New York Times will add a Bay Area metro report to its Northern California editions on Fridays and Sundays.

It will start with content written by Times' staffers and assorted contributors, and will focus on public affairs, culture and Bay Area lifestyles. The Times already has a 10-person San Francisco news bureau.

It will really get interesting when the paper fulfills its goal of partnering with one or more local journalism organizations in an effort to build a cooperative news outlet, something that will likely happen within the year. Warren Hellman's Bay Area News Project has been one of those organizations rumored to be in the mix.

"At a time when so many news organizations are in a forced retreat, it's exciting to be part of a venture that has set out to build more and better news coverage," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, in the official release. "And as someone who grew up in the Bay Area, I'm proud that we can play a role in enriching the quality of reporting about the region."

Editing the project is Times staffer Felicity Barringer. Daniel Weintraub, the public affairs columnist for the Sacramento Bee for the last nine years, will write a politics column. Scott James, the founder of San Francisco's SoMa Literary Review, will write a local column. These pieces will also appear on NYTimes.com, as will a blog leading discussions of Bay Area topics.