Last week, when MediaNews announced that it was purchasing three dozen Knight Ridder papers from the McClatchy Co., we briefly touched upon how the deal might affect journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to most of the papers up for play. More specifically, we compared the ring of current and soon-to-be MediaNews newspapers surrounding the city of San Francisco to a noose tightening around the neck of the struggling San Francisco Chronicle. That situation, however, was complicated by the fact that the Hearst Company, which owns the Chronicle, had actually helped finance MediaNews acquisitions in return for an unspecified equity interest in MediaNews — in other words, Hearst had seemingly helped to tie the knot on the rope around its own neck.
Recently, the San Jose Newspaper Guild has published on its Web site a map of all the MediaNews papers in the Bay Area, big and small, along with all the papers it’s acquiring from Knight Ridder — a total of some 44 publications. Overall, it’s a nice, graphic illustration depicting the extent of media consolidation in the region.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local, independent and mostly impenetrable alternative weekly, published an editorial bemoaning the consolidation and the expanding power of Dean Singleton, the owner of MediaNews.
“The upshot: MediaNews will take over the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, along with some 33 small-market dailies and weeklies, which, combined with the 11 Bay Area papers the chain already owns, will give Singleton control of every major daily newspaper in the Bay Area except the Chronicle,” wrote the Bay Guardian. “It creates the potential for a newspaper monopoly of stunning proportions — and threatens the quality of journalism in one of the most populous, educated, and liberal regions in the nation.”
What seems stunning to us, however, is that anyone would be so fired up to defend the status quo of daily journalism in and around San Francisco. From where we sit, anything that threatens the current quality of daily journalism in most of Northern California would seem like a good thing.
After all, the Chronicle in its current precarious state is itself a product of poorly executed media consolidation. Back in 1999, the Hearst Co., then owner of the much smaller San Francisco Examiner, bought the Chronicle and assumed its name, essentially turning San Francisco into a one-newspaper town. That consolidation did not go well, according to various observers, including David Weir, a journalism professor at Stanford University, who in 2004 wrote that since the deal, “the civic health of San Francisco has suffered measurably.”
“Stuck with the daunting prospect of blending some 500 reporters from the two former competitors into one giant newsroom, the Chronicle management stumbled badly,” he added. (The stumble is financial as well as journalistic; currently, the paper is said to be losing up to $1 million a week, even after a major buyout last year that reduced its payroll drastically.)
What impact the nascent alliance between Dean Singleton and the Hearst Co. ultimately has on the largest daily paper in the Bay Area — or on those 44 smaller papers now in Singleton’s hands — is a long way from being determined. But for the time being, the default option seems to be for the Chronicle to remain in a stumble.
That hardly seems like a situation worth preserving — let alone fretting over.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.