San Francisco Chronicle

When ex-Chronicle writer Delfin Vigil was shown the door as part of last spring's staff reduction, he did not go quietly. While still employed by the newspaper, he preemptively took out an ad in the Examiner which consisted of an essay he wrote, titled, "The Chronicle in Ruins."

Now, months after being laid off, he's making another statement -- albeit indirectly and mostly inadvertently.

Vigil's band, Amores Vigilantes, will be releasing their first record, "West Coast Kingdom," on Dec. 8. The record was recorded in the Chronicle's basement.

It wasn't so much a company-sanctioned setup as it was that Vigil, looking for a quiet place to work amid the ongoing turmoil, discovered in the basement a back room (used to store book-review books) so isolated that one had to pass through another back room (used to store newspapers) to get to it. Nearby was a bevy of abandoned printing presses and vast rooms used mainly for storing long-forgotten detritus.

A perfect place to record rock 'n roll, soundproofing included. Vigil soon took it upon himself to secret bandmates and instruments into the building on nights and weekends for sessions. His only audience: a janitor, a security guard and book-review editor Oscar Villalon, who happily relinquished sole deed to the space.

"At first I just started bringing my guitar in to work, and would go down there when I could get away," Vigil told BayNewser. "Then I started bringing in microphones and recorders. I had a whole studio overnight. Heck, I had a fridge in there. And when it came time to record, Fifth and Mission is such an easy place for everybody to meet."

Vigil's editor, Joe Brown, delighted to see someone in the building actively embrace an alternative form of artistic expression, endorsed the effort. A different editor, however, got wind of what was happening, and, under auspices that the company needed to use the space, kicked Vigil out. "Up until the day I left, they never did use that space again," he said.

All told, Vigil estimates that two-thirds of the record was written or recorded in the Chronicle's basement. For a taste, click here.

"The thing about that building is the people who built it had big dreams for the place," he said. "It still has a lot of soul -- it's just that the people who run the place find new and creative ways to suffocate it."

If there's a big-picture analogy, perhaps it's that both sanctioned and unsanctioned creativity has been going on within the walls at the Chronicle for some time; the similarity between them is that management can't seem to sufficiently monetize either one.

Amores Vigilantes will be playing in San Francisco at Cafe du Nord on Dec. 17.

Amores Vigilantes members K.C. Staubach (left) and Delfin Vigil (right) flank San Francisco iconoclast Frank Chu.

The Chronicle was quick to trumpet its new glossy paper stock, which has indeed garnered significant attention. It makes the Chronicle the country's first newspaper to use glossy print as part of its daily run.

Then again, reported Editor & Publisher yesterday, it might not be so glossy, after all.

Turns out the Chron's new look won't be on magazine-grade paper, but on groundwood-grade paper that, while smoother than standard newsprint pages, is "only somewhat glossier." It's the stuff, says E&P, of some Sunday supplements and mass-market (read: not high-end) catalogs.

At least the heatset process the printer will use on the pages should make them glossier than they would otherwise be.

This is all glossing over the bigger picture, however: Why do this at all?

E&P points out that the Chronicle has an iconoclastic history of oddball printing practices, most notably its use of green paper for the sports pages (hence its label, the "Sporting Green.") Of course, newsprint costs for special paper virtually did away with that practice many years ago, until it was recently resurrected, not with green paper but with green ink.

The better guess would be that the move is related to advertising. When the New York Times announced its Bay Area edition, it was angling to draw some of the higher-end advertisers of products for the affluent, who had abandoned (or never signed on with) the Chronicle. This is at least partially behind the Wall Street Journal's recent grab for local territory, as well.

Providing full color on at least somewhat glossy paper should help the Chron get some of that market back. (Indeed, the Associated Press confirmed that the newspaper had already lined up at least "some" advertising commitments, though the Chron failed to say from whom.)

Which, if new revenue outstrips new costs, all makes at least a modicum of sense.

When the Chronicle signed a deal with Canadian company Transcontinental Inc. to print its papers in Fremont (thus shuttering its own presses and eliminating hundreds of in-house jobs), it was heralded by the parties in question as a win-win situation.

These days, however, Transcontinental might be reconsidering.

According to the San Francisco Business Journal, after the company opened a $200 million, 338,000-square-foot plant and signed on with the Chronicle, Transcontinental's president of printing products and services, Francois Oliver, said, "Believe me, we're partnering with winners!"

These days, not so much. The nosedive of the entire newspaper industry threatens to take the local printing operation with it (although Transcontinental boasts of a backup plan should the Chronicle fold).

Still, the owner of the Dallas Morning News just shut down a huge printing plant in order to consolidate operations, and the Montreal Gazetter recently reported that Transcontinental "production has been declining steadily for the past three years as they adjust to sinking U.S. demand."

At least the Canadians have prescription-drug exports to fall back on.

BayNewser has mentioned both these things before, but the coming days will see multiple changes in the Chronicle.

Starting Thursday, the newspaper's tabloid-style entertainment section, 96 hours, will be joined by a new section, "Ovation," that focuses on more couth events (our words, not theirs) such as opera, ballet and theater.

On Monday, the Chronicle will become the first newspaper in the nation to feature glossy paper as part of its regular print run. The high-quality stock won't cover every page, but, says the Associated Press, the front page, most section fronts and some inside pages will be glossy, as will several features sections on Sundays.

The paper suffered a recent 26-percent circulation drop, but says that it's part of a plan to become leaner by eliminating less-profitable subscriptions, thus saving on printing costs. The paper actually makes money some weeks, said publisher Frank Vega recently.

Yesterday's report that the Chronicle's 25-percent circulation drop was the biggest of any top-25 daily newspaper over the past year has spurred today's article in the Chronicle touting the fact that its "strategy shift" is starting to "pay off."

It's the business model at work, writes David R. Baker, and the circulation drop is part of the plan. Said publisher Frank Vega, the circulation drop was the "expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue."

What this means is that the Chronicle is now relying more on reader-based income, which is steadily climbing -- at least on a per-capita basis. The weekly subscription rate has climbed from $4.75 to $7.75 over the last 18 months, and the paper has scaled back on cut-rate subscription offers geared mainly toward boosting circulation in the name of ad revenue.

Is it working? Vega said the Chronicle actually turns a profit, at least occasionally, after bleeding money for years. (The story fails to mention the part of the strategy shift that involves a thinned staff after multiple rounds of layoffs over recent years.)

It’s not a bad strategy, writes Peter Kafka in Media Memo -- print fewer copies, and charge more for the ones you sell. The New York Times, for example, saw a 7-percent drop in daily circulation, but almost a 7-percent increase in circulation, due to price increases. (The single-copy price has jumped from $1.50 to $2.00, and the Sunday paper now costs $6.)

Still, readership for SFGate is up; the Chronicle's combined print and online editions reach about 1.9 million people in the Bay Area in any given week.

The latest circulation numbers are out for the newspaper industry, and while they aren't pretty in general, they're particularly abhorrent for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Overall, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, in the half-year ending Sept. 30, overall daily circulation for the 379 papers reporting to the bureau was down 10.6 percent.

The Chronicle was the biggest loser among the top 25 papers, plummeting 25.8 percent to 251,782 copies sold per day. USA Today fell 17.1 percent to 1.9 million, The New York Post dropped 18 percent and the New York Daily News fell 14 percent. In comparison, The New York Times suffered only a 7.3 percent drop.

The only paper to show an increase was the Wall Street Journal, which rose 0.6 percent, to 2.02 million. (The Journal's subscription-based online edition counts toward those numbers.)

Daily Finance uses another example to illustrate how tough times are for print: of the 10 leading circulation gainers, four made the list with increases of less than 1 percent.

Update: SFGate.com, meanwhile, logged almost 125 million page views in September, a 36-percent gain over September 2008 and a record high for the second straight month.

Update 2: The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club offers a roundup of how other Bay Area publications fared.

Update 3: Alan Mutter notes that newspaper circulation is now at its lowest level since before World War II! (Reflections of a Newsosaur)

Amid years of sinking advertising, the Chronicle (and newspapers across the country) received a bit of good news recently: auto ads are back, at least a little.

Spurred by the federal government's "Cash for Clunkers" program, which offered steep rebates for those trading in older cars for more environmentally friendly new models, automakers beefed up their efforts to get out the word.

It also didn't hurt that GM emerged from bankruptcy protection during this period, and that other large manufacturers are planning late-year pushes for new models.

Bloomberg quoted Jeff Bergin, the Chronicle's senior vice president of advertising, saying that automaker revenue has stabilized after it "kind of dried up for us at the beginning of the year as they cut back and went through their troubles. We've seen a pretty robust return of national advertising from the manufacturers."

After a record-setting free-fall in the first half of the year -- 29 percent and 28 percent for the first two quarters, respectively -- overall ad sales at U.S. newspapers dropped "only" 23 percent in the third quarter.

(Via San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.)

Jen Phillips of Mother Jones Magazine makes note of Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle's approach to the recent Roman Polanski saga, which from beginning to end could charitably be characterized as "inelegant."

First, LaSalle published a piece in support of Polanski, on Oct. 11. By Oct. 12, however, it had been removed from SFGate. Why, asks Phillips?

Seems that LaSalle took it down himself, after a barrage of angry commenters led him to write that he was "leaving this post up for exactly five more minutes, and then I'm taking it down because I can't keep up with . . . the stupidity. Five more minutes, maybe I'll put it back up later."

Both story and comments are back up on SFGate (along with, as of this writing, 371 comments), but LaSalle has personally deleted many of them due to their "personal attacks or vulgarity." He's also threatened to re-scuttle the piece "if things degenerate to the level they were."

(For a first-hand look at what's turned into a disjointed dialogue between writer and public, head on over to LaSalle's comments.)

"To me," said Phillips, "that represents a serious breach in journalistic judgment. If you can’t take the heat . . . Don’t ask people to sympathize with a pedophile and rapist."

This spring, the Chronicle rolled out a revamped print edition, thanks to high-tech presses in Fremont. Now, it's introduced a new electronic version of the newspaper -- an exact replica of the print version that can be read on computers, Kindles and iPhones.

Benefits of the e-version include access to a 30-day archive, the ability to translate it into 11 languages, enlarge the text and even to have it read aloud. Search options assist in finding current and past articles.

With no scalable production costs, it's also easy for the Chronicle to donate; 25,000 "copies" are given each day to Bay Area students and teachers.

The new edition comes through a partnership with software business Tecnavia.

Chronicle Editor Emeritus Phil Bronstein wonders in his Bronstein at Large column on SFGate today whether The New York Times is "too rich for your blood." Using phrases like "catering to the country estate crowd," Bronstein says that the New York paper's target demographic is the uber-wealthy -- not a Bay Area ethos at all.

He also mentions that the Times is "stewing in its own crock pot of debt (with) losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars."

Kind of the pot calling the crock pot black, no?

Bronstein does mention at the end of his piece that, oh yeah, the Times is planning a Bay Area edition, which he attributes to the paper's desire to reach a "luxury liner full of techno-kings, real estate barons and old money readers waiting for a serious publication designed just for them."

That's certainly the case. What's left unsaid is that the only reason this luxury liner's passengers are available is that the Chronicle has failed to adequately serve them.

Only time will tell if it actually does. Its motivation, however, is no different than the Chronicle or any other newspaper. Let's make some money.