On Sunday afternoon, January 28, 2007, a bit after 2pm, there was a house fire on the 2000 block of McAllister Street, just off Masonic Avenue, in San Francisco, California, USA. 
The fire trucks’ sirens drew our attention to the black smoke pouring into the sky. We watched the ladder trucks arrive and extend, and the smoke choked off in under 30 minutes. This scene was visible from our house, and we walked over later in the afternoon to see the aftermath. Wasn’t much to see from the outside, beyond lots of ashy debris piled on the street in front of the house. The exterior was not breached, at least as far as we could see. It didn’t appear, from general attitudes of those lingering and watching, that anyone had been hurt. But I wondered.
In this morning’s printed San Francisco Chronicle, there was nothing at all. Not a word.
On the website, there were two or three paragraphs, noting that the two-alarm fire was brought under control in 20 minutes or so, and no one had been hurt. Nothing more. I noticed, sort of, the byline Bay City News.
When I went back this evening, to see if there was more, the information was gone. Why? Because the Chronicle doesn’t cover its own named city with anything approaching comprehensiveness. Instead, the Chronicle purchases some of its local news from a business called Bay City News, and if you look carefully here, you will (for a few weeks, I think), be able to see the headline in question: Buy - Jan 28, 2007 - BCN58 - UPDATE: TWO-ALARM SF FIRE UNDER CONTROL (108 words).
I’m not interested enough to pay $20 for the 108 words (~$0.05/word) I read earlier this morning for free, but I did click the “Buy” link to find out that price, and was accosted by this pop-up window.
By clicking OK you agree that you are not an employee or representative of a media organization and you agree not to reuse, republish or retransmit the information you receive without the express written consent of Bay City News Service.
I guess this counts as DRM on a budget: assert your copyright. I know nothing about Bay City News beyond what’s written there: 20 reporters, around since 1979. I wonder if any local news organization (print, online, radio, TV) is not dependent on this wire service.
So much for local news
In an era when the Boston Globe (among many others) is closing foreign bureaus for cost-cutting reasons, I would expect a death grip on the last “exclusive” a local newspaper has…local news. Instead, that grip has slipped. Or maybe it slipped long ago and I just noticed!
I’m well aware there are more important stories to cover. I just found a local fire something of immense interest to a group of people loosely coupled by geography, and little answer to this information need. Maybe there never was a time when the Chronicle and other big city papers covered this kind of event closely (or at all). But the myth, at least, of local news was that crime, fire, school boards, and the like were the foundation of a newspaper. If these “beats” have disappeared, then where is the heart of the newspaper?
More information about the fire
I don’t know the exact address, but the fire was right here, in the building to the right of the green arrow. You can see the five photos I took, although I apologize for their distance. I didn’t bring the camera when we walked over later.
All I could find on the web was this brief mention on a firefighter blog, which points to the local ABC TV affiliate website story, written by Bay City News (of course). At least I saved $20.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Mark Lander // Jan 30, 2007 at 11:23 am
John,
Thanks for your fine critique of the lack of San Francisco news in the SF Chronicle. Since Hearst bought out the Chronicle just a few years ago, the paper’s local news coverage has declined dramatically. There is no longer a “City Hall Beat” column (Rachel Gordon’s column dropped in 2006), no Friday section focused on San Francisco (or other areas of the Bay; dropped in 2006), little or no coverage of development proposals or developments under or nearing construction in the Sunday Real Estate section (Dan Levy’s column is gone; dropped in 2005 or 2006).
The remaining local coverage reads little better than a police blotter. If resources had been shifted to national news or international news or the Datebook, that would help explain the lack of coverage. But all of the news areas in the Chronicle have declined.
It’s sad when someone has to pick up the free dailies - the Examiner and SF Daily News - to get a few tidbits of local news but that’s the reality now.
I would agree with your assessment that, given limited resources, the Chronicle would focus most on local news - the news coming from the City’s and suburbs’ neighborhoods. Instead, the new publishers of the Chronicle have reduced it to a 10-minute daily read, mostly of articles written by other news agencies.
2 Scripting News for 2/11/2007 « Scripting News Annex // Feb 11, 2007 at 6:47 am
[...] Posted in Scripting News at 6:37 am by Dave Winer John Roberts: Who actually covers local news? [...]
3 Dan // Feb 12, 2007 at 11:46 am
Who’s covering local news? One answer is … you are. Take a look at the Chronicle’s page one Sunday story on the changes at KFTY in Santa Rosa for an example: Much of the newsroom staff was fired to cut costs (this is a Clear Channel operation) and the fuzzy plan in place is for the audience to provide content. We’ll see.
How does that connect to the Chronicle’s news coverage? The paper’s circulation decline started in 1988. Back then, it had a giant staff by today’s standards and fancied itself a regional paper. It has been contracting ever since. As a privately held entity, it’s been shielded to some small degree by the type of naked profit pressure that has driven the great Knight-Ritter papers to editorial ruin. Nonetheless, the deYoungs, and now the Hearsts, didn’t get big bank accounts by being sentimental. The paper had a brief, entirely artificial growth in staff after its merger with the old Hearst Examiner. But staff cuts and other cost cutting have been the rule of the day for the last several years. Another popular cost-saver: shrinking the news hole and growing the ad line on news pages. Same here as in every big newspaper market, really.
The old newspaper staff was hardly a picture of maximum efficiency; but still, a smaller staff produces less in the way of material as a matter of course. But this doesn’t really explain why your neighborhood fire didn’t make it into the paper. Another strong current in newsrooms is a shift in thinking about how available staff and space ought to be used. So the Chronicle, for instance, is devoting an increasing share of resources to SFGate, staff blogs, and other online projects. There’s also a shift in how surviving newsroom staff is deployed; I think you’ll see the paper tends to reserve reporters for big or special stories, subjects that are more than just the simple news of the day. At the same time, there appears to be a bigger mix of featury material (think “Bad Reporter” Don Asmussen) in the paper as a whole, and probably a greater fraction of staff devoted to producing it, than there was in the old more news-driven days. On top of that, the shrinking news hole is the canvas for a long-evolving experiment on presenting information in visually more interesting ways; in the Chronicle’s case, this usually means running really big pictures.
Enough of the generalities. I did a little exercise learned long ago and measure how the Chronicle’s news hole looks today. I got out a column ruler and measured every inch of the paper’s news pages (I didn’t count business, Datebook, sports, or the editorial/op-ed pages). One page equals 126 column inches (six vertical columns, each 21 inches deep; I’m counting everything–pictures, headlines, graphics, teasers, etc., on the page as part of the news product). Here are the results:
Total pages in news sections: 20
Total available column inches: 2,250
Total news hole: 1,054.5
News/ad percentage: 41.8/58.2
Gross local news space: 655
Net local news space (body type):
319.5
Local news space breakdown:
Total gross space: 655
Net space (body type or “actual copy”): 319.5
Pictures: 145
Other (headlines, graphics, cartoon, etc.): 190.5
Now, I mentioned big pictures; a quarter of the total news space is taken up by photographs (259 inches; 145 of that is staff-generated pix for local stories). The impression that local coverage sure makes up a lot of the news hole goes away when looking at the local story count, 16, and the volume of actual copy that they comprise, 319.5 column inches, and how that volume is split up. My impression of the paper over the last couple of years, especially, is that it’s made a big shift to devoting most of its staff effort and space to a relatively small number of stories that it tries to give more in-depth (and often splashy) treatment. In today’s paper, three-quarters of the local copy comes from eight stories–three on the paper’s front page, the rest in the local section. Sixteen stories–no one really believes that represents a meaningful slice of local life
To mean anything, really, you need to repeat this exercise to get a better running picture. And for good measure, do a random sample of papers from five and 10 and 15 and 20 years ago to see what trends you can spot.
If you asked the Chronicle editors your question about who covers local news, I’m sure they’d say “we do” and tell you about all the choices they have to make and pressures they’re under. Then they’ll talk about in-depth coverage of key stories that reflect the community’s interests. One thing I don’t think they’ll say is that they’re grasping for what’s coming next and are not even sure media on paper is the business they ought to be in– or will be in in five or 10 years. But they’ve got to be thinking that, and not even they can believe that what they’re putting out is a satisfactory product.
4 Post-Thanksgiving links | clock — watching time, the only true currency // Nov 24, 2007 at 2:15 pm
[...] I didn’t know Steven Berlin Johnson was involved with Outside.in (which I’ve heard about, but not used). When I think to the fire on McAlister in January, his ruminations on The Pothole Paradox make a lot of sense. Not impressive, though, that when I load the site, I get told I’m in Oakland. Better not to guess than guess wrong, even when it’s easy to switch. [...]
Leave a Comment