Inside the Fog,

The Wall Street Journal has started advertising on Muni busses and in the underground stations such as Powell station in downtown San Francisco. While nearly all the ads seem reasonable enough, there is this one that you see above. While it would not be imidiately suspect in any other major US city (with the exception of maybe Houston) in San Francisco it seems like a shallow stab at our failing paper. I cannot though, truely say, that our Chroncile does not deserve it. The newsroom has been shrinking at the paper and the news is increasingly coming from via the New York Times, AP, and yes, even the Wall Street Journal’s wire services.

The San Francisco Chronicle is dying. It has a terminal illness and as I watch it fail I cannot help but to feel sick. Out of all the intelligent people in the world, can nobody find a way to save the newspaper industry? Out of all the intelligent people in San Francisco can nobody find a way to save The Chronicle?

As The New York Times pointed out in an insightful article recently, The Chronicle’s location is already a problem. San Francisco’s isolated position in the Bay Area has made it a difficult place for a newspaper to thrive. While a well-educated and intellectual city, which one might think would make ideal conditions for a newspaper. Apparently in part the less obvious have led to the demise of the paper. San Francisco does not have a ring of suburbs and this isolation is leading to its demise which is a depressing occurrence indeed.

When the printing press was invented in the 1300’s it opened the floodgates for every philosopher with ideas to make them public. This led the way to spreading news and from there the Renaissance took off and enlightenment took hold of Europe paving the way for the modern world. What we see now with the fall of newspapers as we know them is not an advancement, it is quite the opposite actually. Before the printing press the church and locals with good rhetoric were the only ones who could pass along news. So in essence there was a monopoly on any form of reliable news (held by the church) and the only other news was passed along quite unreliably by a peasant who would tell the news orally. Now we have this happening again. Blogs, are in no way shape or form a reliable source of news and they should not be treated as such. Once the paper falls we will have two on line sources. The strongest newspapers (who at that point will probably have most mainstream stories fed to them by wire services) and independent, non-verified, unreliable blogs. Once again there will be a monopoly on the news held by the powerful and the utterly clueless powerless. Newspapers created reliable diversity. A group of dedicated people could start a newspaper and create a reliable source of news that also dealt with issues important to them. It would be a cohesive collection of their ideas (as well as, one would hope, some news) and it would be treated as such. Unlike blogs which provide only insight on reported news and entertainment. This is the greatest tragedy in the loss of the newspaper. 

This is why we must mourn the loss of great papers such as the Seattle P-I and the Rocky Mountain News.

         If this issue of losing your newspaper seems foreign or you cannot seem to find any emotional connection to your hometown newspaper, just watch the video on the homepage of what was The Rocky Mountain News’ website.