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San Francisco, 2014—With the collapse of the business model undergirding the tradition of muckraking journalism—and the double-digit profit margins it supplied—most newspapers that survived the last five years did so by cutting staff, eliminating coverage areas, and hyping easy-to-report fluff. In the process, many U.S. cities lost their civic watchdogs. After slashing hundreds of journalists, many newsrooms became increasingly frivolous and irrelevant. Witness these lead headlines from the January 2014 San Francisco Chronicle:

Macy’s Fab Fashion Show: Day 6

Perfect Waves for 16th Annual Surf Competition

Man’s Best Fiend: Dogs Snacked on Victims of Nob Hill Double Murder

The San Francisco Public Press survived, however, by throwing out two assumptions deeply embedded in the DNA of corporate media. The first was the notion that newspaper owners had to make a profit. The second was that the journalism had to be subsidized by ads.

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