2 links from 2 x-newspaper folks paint a scary picture. Maybe there will only be an online "paper" soon. I don't read it anymore, just check it online sometimes and see what's laying around the studio @ KFOG, scanning the headlines for about 30 seconds.
Oh wait I do look for the Big 5 ad every week!
Why don't I read it? I dunno. I do subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
Not for their editorial page, I don't read them, but for their business news and Walt Mossberg type stuff. They actually have a great arts section.
I used to always read the Chronicle. The Sunday entertainment Pink Section was a must read. A few years ago they changed it all around.
I hate that they stopped putting people on the front of the Pink.
That was so cool to wonder who was going to be there every week. But they dropped that.
They had horrible interviews with bands. I know it was supposed to be ironic to ask these musicians stupid questions, but for me the reader who wants to read a good interview with real interesting questions it was awful. I would keep hoping they were going to change that, but I don't know if they ever did.
Then there was some wild woman sex column or something in that section. Not that that shouldn't be in the paper, but it didn't seem to fit. I wanted a nice interesting entertainment hunk o paper to get lost in. I didn't care to read about er umm "lubrication" issues or whatever. Again not that it shouldn't be in the paper, just maybe not there.
Other than the Pink section, I also used to read lots of sports. But it seems like everyone in the sports section HATES the local teams. They just seemed to always write about how every team sucked and things can't get better. It makes it hard to be a fan of local teams. No it makes it impossible to be a fan. I am a big fan of all the local teams and totally avoid all newspaper coverage of them because it is all so snarky and downbeat. Not that I want "homer" journalists, but man it is so bad, as Jim Rome callers would say "I'm Out!"
Now I just read Tom's outdoor stuff online.
And I blame George Bush.
I used to really love Jon Carrol. Witty, funny, creative, and hey he lives in Oakland. He'd shine a little good light on the East Bay.
But for 8 years I think he has written the same column. Bush sucks, he's an idiot etc. Ok ok I get it. In fact I got it the first 6 years you wrote that.
I guess I'm wrong to think I want a columnist like him to keep writing about his cats and daughter. It's his call.
But it all just wore me out.
So after some time it was just so much of a bummer to read the Chron.
There was really nothing for me. The entertainment stuff was "ironic" and everybody hated the local sports teams, and President Bush.
I hope they survive. The online news world has lots of crap that is just made up or gets thrown on the wall to see if it sticks. A good paper, online or offline, gives you the sense that somebody has fact checked the info and you can trust the final product at least a little.
Anyway here's 2 gloomy blog posts about the San Francisco Chronicle. The numbers are truly shocking.
from
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/01/somethings-gotta-give-at-sf-chronicle.html
...the newspaper is said by knowledgeable sources to have suffered an operating loss of approximately $75 million in 2008 on top of unabated operating losses in every year since Hearst bought it for $600 million in 2000.
Add together the purchase price and the ongoing losses that Hearst has been subsidizing with profits from its other media operations and the publisher, conservatively, has put more than $1 billion into the newspaper with no hope of a profit in sight. The bulk of the money was spent before 2008, when the economy took its worst turn in more than 75 years.
from
http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/will-william-randolph-hearst-iii-save.html
Hearst chose perhaps the worst possible year, 2000, to buy the Chronicle: It paid $660 million that July, which seems astonishing today, after eight years of the industry's rapid decline. (How much did Hearst overpay? That price is nearly a third of Gannett's current total market capitalization, $1.96 billion -- including USA Today! -- based on this afternoon's closing stock price, $8.59 a share.)
The deep recession that began more than a year ago only added to Hearst losses here that have averaged nearly $800,000 a week since mid-2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment