It’s by and large a 24/7 news world now, though occasionally one still comes across certain exceptions. This morning, for instance, the New York Times ran its first story reporting on the grand jury subpoenas issued last Friday to the San Francisco Chronicle and two of its journalists in connection with the BALCO case — three days after the Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Petersburg Times published the news.
Must be the different time zones.
Speaking of slow, something’s stuck in the spokes at the Chronicle. Subpoenas or not, we were surprised to find a story today from the front page of the paper’s business section carrying the headline, “Huge Silicon Valley Land Deal.”
The story exclaims, “An investment firm owned by a German bank has bought a huge chunk of Silicon Valley office and research space from two local billionaires in what is billed as the biggest single commercial real estate transaction ever in the region.” Apparently, “RREEF, the San Francisco real estate division of Deutsche Bank AG., said Monday that it has purchased 119 buildings on 337 acres spread through Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Milpitas and San Jose.”
The Chronicle notes that Peery-Arrillaga, a developer in Santa Clara, sold the property for an estimated $1.1 billion. How did it find this number? Well, though the “industry buzz” one Silicon Valley real estate specialist had heard.
A deal of that size would, we think, deserve close scrutiny — but the Chronicle article appeared to rely largely on a RREEF “announcement,” which was especially generous considering that RREEF did not return the paper’s calls.
More notable was this salient fact borne out by some quick Web searching: The news the Chronicle gave its print readers today is nearly two weeks old.
“One of Silicon Valley’s largest real estate holdings changed hands this week with the long-anticipated sale of Peery-Arrillaga’s 5 million-square-foot portfolio for $1.1 billion to RREEF,” the San Jose Mercury News reported in its business digest back on Friday, April 28, adding that Peery-Arrillaga had “put the portfolio up for sale a year ago with no listing price.” The Mercury News referred to a statement from CB Richard Ellis (the broker for both the buyer and the seller) which somehow escaped the attention of the Chronicle.
Meantime, the Silicon Valley/San Jose BusinessJournal reported the story even earlier — on Wednesday, April 26, the same day the sale closed. That’s not to say their piece was any great shakes, as much of it was simply rewritten from the CB Richard Ellis press release.
In any case, the Chronicle was left in the dust — until today, when it led readers to think they were reading something fresh.
More stories like this one, and the Chronicle‘s circulation will continue to plunge at a frightening pace, whether it eliminates “copies with little value for advertisers” or not. (In the latest bloodletting, the paper’s daily circulation is down 15.6 percent, with the Sunday edition down 12 percent.)
Our recommendation to the Chronicle: Learn how to use Google. Or at least transfer over from that telegraph system.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.