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 TheSan Francisco Chronicle's front page, April 22, 1906 | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner | Hearst Communications |
| Publisher | Bill Nagel |
| Founded | From Jan 16, 1865 to Aug 31, 1868, known as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle; From Sept 1, 1868 to Aug 14, 1869, known as Daily Morning Chronicle; and from Aug 15, 1869, known as San Francisco Chronicle. |
| Headquarters | 901 Mission Street San Francisco,California 94103 |
| Circulation | 152,788 Digital Subsribers[1] 39,300 Average print circulation[2] |
| ISSN | 1932-8672 (print) 2574-5921 (web) |
| OCLC number | 8812614 |
| Website | sfchronicle sfgate |
TheSan Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily theSan Francisco Bay Area ofNorthern California. It was founded on January 16, 1865 asThe Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothersCharles de Young andMichael H. de Young.[3] It underwent a name change in 1868 and, for less than a year, was published asThe Daily Morning Chronicle. Finally, on August 15, 1869, the newspaper was published under its current name and assumed a daily publication frequency starting with the September 9, 1872, issue.[4]
The paper benefited from the growth of San Francisco and had the largestnewspaper circulation on theWest Coast of the United States by 1880. Like other newspapers, it experienced a rapid fall in circulation in the early 21st century and was ranked 18th nationally by circulation in the first quarter of 2021.[5]
In 1994, the newspaper launched theSFGate website, with a soft launch in March and an official launch on November 3, 1994, including both content from the newspaper and other sources. "The Gate", as it was known at launch, was the first large market newspaper website in the world, co-founded by Allen Weiner and John Coate. It went on to staff up with its own columnists and reporters, and even won a Pulitzer Prize for Mark Fiore's political cartoons.[6]
The paper is owned by theHearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco. In 2013, the newspaper launched its ownnamesake website, SFChronicle.com, and began the separation ofSFGate and theChronicle brands, which today are two separately run entities.
TheChronicle was founded by brothersCharles andM. H. de Young in 1865 asThe Daily Dramatic Chronicle,[3] funded by a borrowed $20 gold piece. Their brother Gustavus was named with Charles on the masthead.[8][9] Within 10 years, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of theMississippi River. The paper's first office was in a building at the corner of Bush andKearney Streets. The brothers then commissioned a building fromBurnham and Root at 690Market Street at the corner of Third and Kearney Streets to be their new headquarters, in what became known asNewspaper Row. The new building, San Francisco's first skyscraper, was completed in 1889. It was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, but it was rebuilt under the direction of William Polk, Burnham's associate in San Francisco. That building, known as the "OldChronicle Building" or the "DeYoung Building", still stands and was restored in 2007. It is a historic landmark and is the location of theRitz-Carlton Club and Residences.[7]
In 1924, theChronicle commissioned a new headquarters at 901Mission Street on the corner of 5th Street in what is now the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco. It was designed by Charles Peter Weeks and William Peyton Day in theGothic Revival architecture style, but most of the Gothic Revival detailing was removed in 1968 when the building was re-clad with stucco. This building remains theChronicle's headquarters in 2017, although other concerns are located there as well.[7]
BetweenWorld War II and 1971, new editorScott Newhall took a bold and somewhat provocative approach to news presentation. Newhall'sChronicle included investigative reporting by such journalists asPierre Salinger, who later played a prominent role in national politics, andPaul Avery, the staffer who pursued the trail of the self-named "Zodiac Killer", who sent acryptogram in three sections in letters to theChronicle and two other papers during his murder spree in the late 1960s.[10] It also featured such colorful columnists asPauline Phillips, who wrote under the name "Dear Abby", "Count Marco" (Marc Spinelli),Stanton Delaplane, Terence O'Flaherty,Lucius Beebe,Art Hoppe,Charles McCabe, andHerb Caen.
The newspaper grew in circulation to become the city's largest, overtaking the rivalSan Francisco Examiner. The demise of other San Francisco dailies through the late 1950s and early 1960s left theExaminer and theChronicle to battle for circulation and readership superiority.
The competition between theChronicle andExaminer took a financial toll on both papers until the summer of 1965, when a merger of sorts created aJoint Operating Agreement under which theChronicle became the city's sole morning daily while theExaminer changed to afternoon publication (which ultimately led to a declining readership).
The newspapers were officially owned by the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which managed sales and distribution for both newspapers and was charged with ensuring that one newspaper's circulation did not grow at the expense of the other.Revenue was split equally, which led to a situation widely understood to benefit theExaminer, since theChronicle, which had a circulation four times larger than its rival, subsidized the afternoon newspaper.[11]
The two newspapers produced a joint Sunday edition, with theExaminer publishing the news sections and the Sunday magazine, and theChronicle responsible for thetabloid-sized entertainment section and the book review. From 1965 on the two papers shared a single classified-advertising operation. This arrangement stayed in place until the Hearst Corporation took full control of theChronicle in 2000.
Beginning in the early 1990s, theChronicle began to face competition beyond the borders of San Francisco. The newspaper had long enjoyed a wide reach as the de facto "newspaper of record" in Northern California, with distribution along theCentral Coast, the Central Valley, and even as far asHonolulu, Hawaii. There was little competition in the Bay Area suburbs and other areas that the newspaper served, but as Knight-Ridder consolidated theMercury News in 1975; purchased theContra Costa Times (nowEast Bay Times) in 1995; and as the Denver-basedMedia News Group made a rapid purchase of the remaining newspapers on the East Bay by 1985, theChronicle realized it had to step up its suburban coverage.
TheChronicle launched five zoned sections to appear in the Friday edition of the paper. The sections covered San Francisco and four different suburban areas. They each featured a unique columnist, enterprise pieces, and local news specific to the community. The newspaper added 40 full-time staff positions to work in the suburban bureaus. Despite the push to focus on suburban coverage, theChronicle was hamstrung by the Sunday edition, which, being produced by the San Francisco-centric "un-Chronicle"Examiner, had none of the focus on the suburban communities that theChronicle was striving to cultivate.[12]
The de Young family controlled the paper, via theChronicle Publishing Company, until July 27, 2000, when it was sold toHearst Communications, Inc. for $660 million, considerably above analysts' $500 million valuation of the paper.[13] Hearst owned theExaminer, and following its purchase of the Chronicle the Hearst Corporation transferred theExaminer to the Fang family, publisher of theSan Francisco Independent andAsianWeek, along with a $66-million subsidy.[14] Under the new owners, theExaminer became a freetabloid, leaving theChronicle as the only dailybroadsheet newspaper in San Francisco.
In 1949, the de Young family foundedKRON-TV (Channel 4), the Bay Area's third television station. Until the mid-1960s, the station (along with KRON-FM), operated from the basement of theChronicle Building, on Mission Street. KRON moved to studios at 1001 Van Ness Avenue (on the former site of St. Mary's Cathedral, which burned down in 1962). KRON was sold toYoung Broadcasting in 2000 and, after years of being San Francisco'sNBC affiliate, became an independent station on January 1, 2002, when NBC—tired of Chronicle's repeated refusal to sell KRON to the network and, later, Young's asking price for the station being too high[15]—purchasedKNTV in San Jose fromGranite Broadcasting Corporation for $230 million.[15]
Since the Hearst Corporation took ownership in 2000 theChronicle has made periodic changes to its organization and design, but on February 1, 2009, as the newspaper began its 145th year of publication, theChronicle Sunday edition introduced a redesigned paper featuring a modified logo, new section, and page organization, new features, bolder, colored section-front banners and new headline and text typography. The frequent bold-faced, all-capital-letter headlines typical of theChronicle's front page were eliminated. Editor Ward Bushee's note heralded the issue as the start of a "new era" for theChronicle.
On July 6, 2009, the paper unveiled some alterations to the new design that included yet newer section fronts and wider use of color photographs and graphics. In a special section publisher, Frank J. Vega described new, state-of-the-art printing operations enabling the production of what he termed "A Bolder, BrighterChronicle." The newer look was accompanied by a reduction in the size of the broadsheet. Such moves are similar to those made by other prominent American newspapers such as theChicago Tribune andOrlando Sentinel, which in 2008 unveiled radically new designs even as changing reader demographics and general economic conditions necessitated physical reductions of the newspapers.
On November 9, 2009, theChronicle became the first newspaper in the nation to print on high-quality glossy paper.[16] The high-gloss paper is used for some section fronts and inside pages.
The current publisher of theChronicle is Bill Nagel.Audrey Cooper was named editor-in-chief in January 2015 and was the first woman to hold the position. In June 2020 she left to be the editor-in-chief of WNYC, New York City. In August 2020, Hearst named Emilio Garcia-Ruiz the publication's editor-in-chief.Ann Killion has written forSports Illustrated.Carl Nolte is a journalist and columnist.
TheChronicle's sports section is edited by Christina Kahrl and calledSporting Green as it is printed on green-tinted pages. The section's best-known writers are its columnists: Bruce Jenkins, Ann Killion, Scott Ostler, and Mike Silver. Its baseball coverage is anchored by Henry Schulman, John Shea, andSusan Slusser, the first female president of theBaseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA).
TheChronicle's Sunday arts and entertainment insert section is calledDatebook, and has for decades been printed on pink-tinted paper in a tabloid format. Movie reviews (for many years written by nationally known criticMick LaSalle) feature a unique rating system: instead of stars or a "thumbs up" system, theChronicle has for decades used a small cartoon icon, sitting in a movie theater seat, known as the "Little Man", explained in 2008 by theChicago Sun-Times film criticRoger Ebert: "...the only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of theSan Francisco Chronicle, who is seen (1) jumping out of his seat and applauding wildly; (2) sitting up happily and applauding; (3) sitting attentively; (4) asleep in his seat; or (5) gone from his seat."[17]
The newspaper's websites were at SFGate.com (free) and SFChronicle.com (premium). OriginallyThe Gate,SFGATE was one of the earliest major market newspaper websites to be launched, on November 3, 1994, at the time ofThe Newspaper Guildstrike; the union published its own news website,San Francisco Free Press, whose staff joined SFGATE when the strike ended.[18] SFChronicle.com launched in 2013[19] and since 2019 has been run separately from SFGATE, whose staff are independent of the print newspaper.[20] As of 2020[update] across all platforms the Chronicle has 34 million unique visitors each month, with SFGATE receiving 135.9 million pageviews and 25.1 million unique visitors per month and SFChronicle.com 31.3 million pageviews and 31.3 million unique visitors per month globally.[21]
The paper has received thePulitzer Prize on a number of occasions.Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada received the2004 George Polk Award for Sports Reporting.[22] Fainaru-Wada and Williams were recognized for their work on uncovering theBALCO scandal, which linkedSan Francisco Giants starBarry Bonds to performance-enhancing drugs.
Circulation has fallen sharply since thedot-com boom peaked from around 1997 to 2001. TheChronicle's daily readership dropped by 16.6% between 2004 and 2005 to 400,906;[23] TheChronicle fired one-quarter of its newsroom staff in a cost-cutting move in May 2007.[24] Newspaper executives pointed to growth of SFGate, the online website with 5.2 million unique visitors per month – fifth among U.S. newspaper websites in 2007.
In February 2009, Hearst chief executive Frank A. Bennack Jr., and Hearst President Steven R. Swartz, announced that theChronicle had lost money every year since 2001 and more than $50 million in 2008. Without major concessions from employees and other cuts, Hearst would put the papers up for sale and, if no buyer was found, shut the paper. San Francisco would have become the first major American city without a daily newspaper.[25] The cuts were made.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the threats, the loss of readers and advertisers accelerated. On October 26, 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that theChronicle had suffered a 25.8% drop in circulation for the six-month period ending in September 2009, to 251,782 subscribers, the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper in the United States.[26]Chronicle publisher Frank Vega said the drop was expected as the paper moved to earn more from higher subscription fees from fewer readers.[27] In May 2013, Vega retired and was replaced as publisher by formerLos Angeles Times publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson.[28] SFGate, the main digital portal for theSan Francisco Chronicle, registered 19 million unique visitors in January 2015, making it the seventh-ranked newspaper website in the United States.[29]
George T. Cameron, son-in-law of the late Mr. H. de Young, will announce in tomorrow morning's issue of theSan Francisco Chronicle that he will assume charge of that newspaper with the title of publisher and president of the Chronicle Publishing Company.
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