SF Chronicle - a plan to help the newspaper

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I happened to run upon an article in today's edition of "Editor and Publisher" which reported that the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper (SFGate.com is the Chronicle website) was planning more layoffs after Labor Day. It may not happen, let's pray not, but staff reductions could come as soon as next week.

Apparently, even after the last round of job cuts about two months ago or so, the newspaper is still losing $1 million a week or about $4 million a month, or a whopping $48 million-a-year loss.

That's really, really sad news as a paper is nothing without the personalities who made it, but I think there's something that can be done to at least save some jobs and stem the tide of revenue losses.

There are as of this writing 2,780,000 pages that make up SFGate.com. My idea is simple: add a donate button to each one of them.

The button would be at the top left of each page. A person could donate as little as $1 and as much as $1,000, but let's say the average donation was $2.

SFGate.com draws about 9 million monthly unique visitors according to this press release issued earlier this year. That comes down to about 290,000 unique visitors a day.

Let's say that just 30,000 people or about 10 percent of the daily visitor count posted a donation of $2 each. (in the video I mistakenly said 180,000 visitors and 10 percent.  That's wrong.) Over the course of a month that could be as much as $1.86 million per month in revenue. That's almost cuts the $4 million deficit in half and helps maintain newspaper staff.

That's really it; the idea's that simple.

Donation is better than news pay

I'm not a fan of the idea of charging for news, as Hearst Corporation is considering of late. It invites a process where one website can feed its content with news from the paysite, and then offer other sites and blog with the chance to link to their site rather than the paysite. Plus, with all of the journalists losing jobs, there are more people out there who know how to get a story and compete with the paysite.

The free news sites will always outnumber and outperform the paysites, regardless of how many big brands do that strategy.

No.

Let people donate if they wish. But backing the effort with an aggressive marketing campaign and a well-designed donation button system will generate new revenue and help save the jobs of a lot of great people at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Journalist Union End Game for Chronicle Could Be Purchase: News: SFAppeal

More at SFAppeal: “As the California Media Workers Guild at the San Francisco Chronicle prepare for a ratification vote on job and compensation concessions to Hearst Corp., the union leadership is exploring potential partnerships to eventually acquire the newspaper.

"In 16 months," said Carl Hall, local Guild representative at The Chronicle, "we should be talking about buy in and not buy-outs."

In an interview Tuesday, Hall was looking past the painful week of negotiations that produced the tentative agreement on concessions that Chronicle publisher Hearst had been demanding under threat of a sale or closure of the 144-year-old paper.

"We are working on it," Hall said. "We hope to form an investor group that would be prepared to step in."”

-- Can they come up with the money, that's the question? And can they generate enough revenue to operate it -- second question. They should team up with Craigslist.

SF Chronicle Owned By Craigslist? A Possible Future

According to Real Clear Politics, The San Francisco Chronicle is one of ten newspapers in trouble.  The total list in order from "still alive" to "almost passed on" is:

10. NY Daily News
9. LA Times
8. St. Paul Pioneer Press
7. Chicago Sun-Times
6. Detroit News
5. San Francisco Chronicle
4. Miami Herald
3. Philadelphia Daily News
2. Rocky Mountain News
1. Seattle Post-Intelligencer





The San Francisco Chronicle, at number five, may cease to exist if management and union can't get together on an adjustment to the collective bargaining agreement.  (UPDATE: Seattle P-I reported close to closure).  That did happen on Monday, with Thursday of this week set as the day for a large meeting for the Chronicle Guild to ratify the agreement.  As of the making of the video, no place was secured but that was to happen today, Tuesday.  It did according to Mediaworkers.org.

The day and time of the meeting is Thursday, March 12,  5-8 p.m respectively and the place is Cyril Magnin room, Parc 55 Hotel, 55 Cyril Magnin St in San Francisco (north from the Chronicle building on Fifth Street and across Market),  and discussion will be from 5:30-7:30 p.m.  They expect to have the vote at 7:30 p.m.

The Chronicle is threatening to cut 225 or more guild positions if the union that represents journalists and other employees doesn’t meet the company’s demands, according to Mediaworkers.org.

The paper has about 500 total guild members, according to a source at the Chronicle.

If the union does agree to concessions, then the paper would cut at least 150 guild positions. The paper wants workers to give up senority rights, cut back vacation and sick leave.  So the paper lays off employees, agreement or not. 

While this is happening, people are steadily moving online to get news.  The number of people visiting newspaper Web sites in January reached a new high,  according to the Newspaper Association of America.  During that month, 74.8 million unique visitors went to newspaper Web sites, an increase of
11% year-over-year and due to the interest in the Obama Inauguration.  It is the highest number of unique users recorded since the association started tracking online industry stats in 2004.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based social listing site Craigslist drew  26.7 million unique visitors in May 2008 alone according to Nielsen Online.  That's just over one-third the total number of new visitors for all of the newspapers in their best month in history.  Craigslist earned $81 million in 2008, $55 million in 2007, and could "easily top $200 million" with some small increase in fees.  All of this with a staff of about 20 people. 

Craiglist is a giant, dwarfing the New York Times and SFGate.com in unique visitors by a large margin claiming 60 percent of daily page view traffic in an Alexa comparison with the two sites.  Why did the SF Chronicle not copy Craigslist?

Or more to another point, is the SF Chronicle going to merge with Craiglist?  I can tell you from a good source that conversations have taken place on some kind of relationship.  Will it lead to Craigslist
buying the Chronicle is anyone's guess, but it's a possible future.


YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Crackle, Sclipo, Viddler and Howcast

Deborah Edgerly v. City of Oakland | Chip Johnson's Right About Favoritism: Welcome To Oakland

I want to be the first Oakland blogger to affirm Chip Johnson's article today charging favoritism in the City of Oakland. My response is that it doesn't start or stop at the CAO's office or with Deborah Edgerly herself, and a really complete look should go back 10 years, not just 2004.

Look, I was treated so terribly by the City of Oakland when I was trying to bring the Super Bowl here, that my own mother -- who's still cancer-free by the way -- observed that "Between Blacks who are jealous of you and Whites who think someone White should be doing what you're doing, you're going through a terrible place."

She was right.

Oakland's government has a long history of hating well-educated Black men who don't follow the normal ethnic stereotypes. I remember 1998, when all of us from Elihu Harris' office -- I was economic advisor -- were being placed in various departments of the City of Oakland after Jerry Brown won a landslide victory to become Oakland's next mayor.

I wanted to run the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex, and I had good reason for my desire. I already had good relationships with all of the sports tenants. I knew the Coliseum budget very well. I knew the legal contracts behind the Raiders Deal so well I could recall them from memory, and in most cases still can. I also knew the business plan for the Coliseum that was written by now former Deputy City Manager Ezra Rapport chapter-and-verse.

So Elihu Harris went to Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who also then as now serves as Chairman of the Coliseum Joint Powers Authority (JPA). Now, let me preface what I'm about to write with how I currently feel and have personally felt about Ignacio. I think he's a great person. I've always enjoyed our personal talks together, and I still do. I know one of his long time aides was upset that I interviewed his challenger Mario Juarez, but that's news and he called me. I have said to Ignacio the invitations open and heck, I've written about him tons of times if you go back to my Montclarion years.

But the truth remains that Ignacio did not want me to run the Coliseum. Period. I think he was still smarting from how I worked to block his attempt to annouce a naming rights deal between UMAX and the Oakland Coliseum while Elihu was out of town and the Raiders had not approved the deal. But the bottom line was that I had to protect my boss, the Mayor, and that's what I did. Period. End of story.

But he wasn't happy about that.

So then-Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb asked me to meet with then-Economic Development head Bill Claggett regarding working over there. So I did have lunch with Bill. It was weird. Basically, Bill said that he thought I talked liked I thought I knew everything and my response was that I talked in plain English, was supposed to sound professional, and I was that way since I was six years old. I felt that Bill wasn't used to well-educated Black men; he was intimidated by me for really no good reason.

So I went to tell Robert Bobb what happened and his response was "You do talk like you think you know everything. You. You're young. Black. Smart. You're a threat. Oakland's a crab-barrel town. They pull you down here."

I was shocked and also pleased that "Mr. Bobb" saw what I was dealing with, because until he said that, I was ready to leave Oakland. I remained because of Robert Bobb. I went over to work for Claggett in Economic Development and wound up heading the effort to bring the Super Bowl here.

But don't think for a moment they made it comfortable for me. It was a constant battle between me, certain execs who thought they should be heading the effort, and also those who perceived me as "White" and not "one of them" and thus created all kinds of stupid and sinister road blocks for me. Some really terrible stuff was done to me that on more than one occasion just privately brought me to tears.

For example, my mail started containing a magazine called "Honey" that I never even purchased or heard of and threw away and complained to the mail staff, then it came again. I went to investigate who did this, and the magpublisher said it was someone with a City of Oakland credit card! Now they did that as a pretty fucked up way of telling me I should date Black women -- it was none of their fucking business who I dated outside of my work hours. But they had a perception and allowed their insecurities to run amok.

That I will not forgive the City for anytime soon, unless they want to give me a long overdue key to the City for my Super Bowl work. Ignacio himself said then -- in fact on October 26, 2000 -- that my work "Was the only positive news the Oakland Coliseum had at the time." He said that after my meeting with the Coliseum JPA (joint powers authority) where they took the action of "no action" on the Oakland Super Bowl Bid.

No kiddding.

I resolved to basically fight the system of the City of Oakland by bringing the Super Bowl here. Every day was a practice in anger, determination, focus, and pressure and I got no help from the City of Oakland even though I worked for them. I had to do everything, from run the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission (which I created from scratch even as then-City Attorney Jane Williams said I would need two years to get approval -- I got it in two months) to answer the phones to make copies of docs, to negotiating contracts with the NFL to carrying 32 boxes of Palm Computers and Bid Books (for each of the team owners) down to a Fed Ex Truck that arrived late and in the pouring rain.

Even with that, I almost succeeded by getting Oakland to one of three finalists for the right to host the Super Bowl, losing to Jacksonville for the 2005 game. What I went through to get that far will make a good book and a great movie.

Don't think that favoritism starts with Deborah Edgerly. It's part of the organizational DNA of Oakland and has been practiced by everyone from then-Mayor Jerry Brown on down. In fact, it was widely known that Jerry didn't want Deborah Edgerly as his first choice for Chief Administrative Officer; he wanted the stiletto and ankle-bracelet-wearing Dolores Blanchard (who was White, not Black as an FYI) to be the one, but she lived in Danville, not Oakland.

Favoritism is in Oakland's genetic makeup. It's time for some genetic engineering.

Sf Chronicle Losing $1 Million A Week - Newspapers In Trouble

According to today's NY Times, the newspaper industry is in trouble, as papers suffer from competition from the Internet. The SF Chron has been losing $1 million a week since last year. As Time O'Reily wrote last year, he reads the online version of the SF Chron 95 percent of the time, and the "offline" version about 5 percent of the time. That's probably true for me, as well, but Tim and I are both in the Internet business.

What can be done? Well, my answer is "nothing" -- the offline news people have to adjust to this New Media world, as do institutions and PR people who have been oriented toward using offline newspapers to get the news out. This also includes sports leagues like the NFL, which has a long standing relationship with such organizations as The Associated Press, but not the Huffington Post, which draws 14 million visitors a month.

The SF Chron seems to be trying to find its way on The Internet, where it gets about 5 million visitors per month. That's still far less than the 23 million visitors that Craigslist gets, but then CL's reach is nationwide.

In fact, I think the future of the SF Chron is -- well, let me restate. The SF Chron should be more of a national and international online news system, with a local twist. Thus, it can get eyeballs from more places than just the Bay Area, but still be focused on the SF Bay Area.

SF Chronicle's Chip Johnson Features SBS Blog Network

Sf Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson featured the SBS Blog Network in his article on Oakland, which you can read here.

But his real "focus" was on Oakland, which is where our blog Oakland Focus comes in. It's at http://oaklandfocus.blogspot.com . This is some of what he wrote:

It's one of more than 50 Web sites posted by Abraham at his business Web site. But when he started writing about Oakland's mayoral election in 2006, he saw a change in the Internet traffic pattern.

"When we added the blog about local politics during the mayoral election - traffic really went up - sky high," Abraham said, doubling in the last two years.

Since his initial endorsement of Dellums, Abraham's view of the mayor has cooled a bit. He hasn't done an about-face, but he's far from satisfied.

His chief complaints are the mayor's lack of focus on housing and downtown redevelopment, his unwillingness to engage in a more public life to promote the city and his decision to endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary race.

"I think he's doing a terrible job. But do I think he can get better?" Abraham asked. "Yes, I do," he said.

Senator Barack Obama Wins SF Chronicle & San Jose Mercury News Endorsement, Guardian Too

After a great appearance before the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Barack Obama won the endorsement of the San Franciso Chronicle and backed that with the "thumbs-up" of the San Jose Mercury News in the South Bay, effectively blunting the New York Times' endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton of one week ago, and adding to a long string of newspapers backing Obama's run for president.

The SF Chronicle wrote a sprited explaination, highlighted by this paragraph:

He radiated the sense of possibility that has attracted the votes of independents and tapped into the idealism of young people during this campaign. He exuded the aura of a 46-year-old leader who could once again persuade the best and the brightest to forestall or pause their grand professional goals to serve in his administration.
Of all the candidates who talk about change, Barack Obama has made the case most forcefully and most convincingly. He gets our endorsement for the Democratic nomination.

The Chronicle's Editorial Board, paced by Opinion Page Editor John Diaz, Executive Editor Phil Bronstein, and Political Editor Carla Marinucci, asked tough questions of Senator Obama, and he came back with honest, thoughful answers. The Chronicle pointed to that in their account:

In a Jan. 17 meeting with our editorial board, Obama demonstrated an impressive command of a wide variety of issues. He listened intently to the questions. He responded with substance. He did not control a format without a stopwatch on answers or constraints on follow-up questions, yet he flourished in it.

The San Jose Mercury news also sits as the major information organ for Silicon Valley. Senator Obama's call for change was particularly attractive:

Obama would dramatically change the nation's approach to foreign policy and domestic issues. While the substance might not differ substantially from Clinton's in many areas, he would have more cross-over appeal to independents and Republicans, whose support will be needed to bring about significant change.
Obama is the only candidate who opposed the Iraq war from the outset. His ethnic background and his upbringing give him a unique world view. He has the best chance to change how the world looks at the United States and restore the respect it has squandered during the past eight years.
While Clinton has a deep understanding of health care issues, her failed attempt to reform the system during her husband's first term dogs her steps. She chose experts with similar views and did not broadly engage stakeholders, which made her end result easy to shoot down. Obama can start fresh, and seems to understand the urgency.

But beyond the Chronicle endorsement, Senator Obama also scored the support of the normally contrarian San Francisco Bay Guardian, long seen as the Bay Area's voice of the young. In short, Obama has scored a "hat trick" with three of the four major newspapers backing him, and with the Oakland Tribune still silent as of this writing.