Here’s a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Debra Saunders, on the paper’s precarious financial position:

A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money. A couple in the back of the room rudely applauded. How thrilled those two must have felt when - if - they learned of Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega’s announcement Tuesday that the Hearst Corp. will implement “significant” workforce cuts. If the cuts don’t pay off, then the Hearst Corp. will “offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether.”

She went on to murmur darkly about the implications of a newspaper’s shutting down and those who could wish for such a thing. Saunders is a right-winger, and one of those ranty types a paper hires, somewhat cynically, to placate the Fox News crowd. In her mind, it’s all political: Righties (justifiably) hate the paper because it’s too liberal, and liberals hate the paper because (if you can believe it) it’s not liberal enough.

My prism is slightly different. I have a lot of friends who work at the Chronicle, and I know better than most how many talented people work there. But it’s also true that a lot of bozos suck up a lot of the operation’s resources, and that its editing hierarchy hit a wall of dysfunctionality decades ago it has never been able to shake. No sensible person is going to applaud the demise of a newspaper; but many serious people will, in effect, refuse to mourn it. Here’s why I think that’s what’s going to happen in SF.

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Names attach to papers in the memories of our youth. Royko in Chicago, Breslin in NYC, even the late Herb Caen in SF. Caen, in fact, was the greatest columnist I ever read. But he died in 1997 and, for me, a different columnist was a much more portentous and representative figure for the Chronicle in the later years of that decade: Jerry Carroll, who, when he wrote a daily column and I, among other things, wrote press criticism for a local alternative weekly, made me glad to be alive and reading newspapers.

This isn’t the noted columnist Jon Carroll, by the way; this is Jerry Carroll, an arts staffer who was tasked around them with a column called “The Lively Arts,” and they certainly were.

One December morning in 1997, I read Carroll plugging an art show that featured works by the bassist of the Who, John Entwistle, in San Jose. Entwistle was in town along with the Who itself, who were performing Quadrophenia in its entirety, Carroll said.

This show, it turned out, had taken place the previous December.

A year earlier.

Carroll spent five or six sentences the next day blaming the mistake on a PR company. The item stayed with me because, as an arts journalist, I deal with more public relations folks than most people, and I had not yet run across one who promoted things a year old. Indeed, I had found publicists somewhat narrow minded in this way, positively shirking any opportunity to publicize an event that had already occurred.

A few months later, I was again happy perusing “The Lively Arts,” when I read about an upcoming appearance by Garrison Keillor at the city’s Masonic Auditorium. “They say Keillor is as abrasive in private as he is affable in public, but I find it hard to believe,” wrote Carroll, impishly.

I remember the item well, first because I thought that the slur against Keillor was a bit backhanded and also a bit… off, because Keillor’s art can actually be quite prickly. The second reason was because … well, because Keillor had brought Prairie Home Companion to the Masonic the previous weekend.

Keillor wasn’t taking about a return engagement; it was another mistake. The next day Carroll blamed a publicist for Minnesota Public Radio, who he said had “faxed [him] the bum info.”

Carroll, I could see, was a veritable journalistic flypaper for heroic-minded publicists who, not being able to get enough of bringing a fine and worthy event to the public’s attention, didn’t feel their work was over at the end of the day, or even after their mission had been accomplished, so to speak.

They continued to get the word out for future, if imaginary, iterations of the same event, just on general principles.

This time Carroll had actually named the culprit—the person who had faxed him the hot, breaking, and incorrect news that Garrison Keillor was appearing in San Francisco a week after the real event.

Intrigued, I called her, just to have the opportunity to speak with this rara avis.

She disappointed me, however, by telling me that she hadn’t faxed anyone any bum info.

The show, she pointed out, had been sold out for months, and I was additionally sad to learn that her press releases—like all the other press releases I had seen in my professional life, which surely numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and, I would warrant, all the other press releases released in a typical year (including, I am sure, the press release on the John Entwistle art shows)—contained an actual date.

The dates are of course provided so journalists are informed of the week, or, in the case of the Entwistle art show, the year they occur.

Now, it was a classic he said/she said situation, to be sure, but I believed the publicist, because I thought the odds were a lot higher that Carroll was a big ol’ fat fucking liar who was trying to point fingers at others for his own mistakes—and that the journalistic culture at the Chronicle was one that either permitted such shenanigans or ignored it.

Indeed, Carroll just kept going, getting things wrong and then wronger. I eventually would write entire columns recapping errors he had made. Blaming other folks for the mistakes became a motif in his work. Once he said that the head of the SF library didn’t have a library card, which, it turned out, wasn’t true. Instead of apologizing for the error and noting that he could have called to check it out, he sloughed it off on a “claim” made by a library employee—which of course Carroll had printed without calling the head of the library for comment.

I guess you could say that Carroll was an early blogger.

The editors of his section, or the higher-ups at the paper, never seemed to be bothered by Carroll, and there was little in the way of public accounting of such stuff. The Chronicle didn’t start running corrections until the 2000s.

And he wasn’t a solitary case, either. The paper’s pop critic, Joel Selvin, would say just about anything, and made mistakes enough for the “Selvin watch” to be a regular feature in our own weekly music column, which we called “Riff Raff.” As the editor of the thing, I tried to be aware that most journalists do make mistakes; our rule was that there had to be at least three actual errors in a single story for us even to consider writing about it—and “Selvin Watch” was still, as I said, a regular feature.

At a time when newspapers were obviously going to be facing challenges, particularly in terms of appeal to younger people, it seemed crazy to put arts coverage in the hands of that pair and their uncomplaining editors, but that was the Chron. Since Selvin, particularly, was so bad at his job, it seemed churlish to complain about how unprolific he was, but I also noticed that he barely got his byline in the paper once a week. Given his decades of employment at the paper, he was probably making a pretty penny, too.

I finally called his editor once to give her a chance to respond, and, well, here’s what happened:

Selvin Watch (The Special Edition) When Riff Raff talked to Chron Entertainment Editor Liz Lufkin recently, we were mostly curious about one thing: What does Joel Selvin do all day? Even in his ’80s heyday the pop-music critic didn’t produce much copy; now it seems that he’s hardly ever in the paper. Lufkin was happy to answer, saying an earlier Riff Raff slight regarding Selvin’s rate of production was “incorrect.” He writes a lot, she said. Fearing we’d wronged him, we did a search of the Chron’s on-line archives and discovered that … Joel Selvin doesn’t write very much. He averaged about an article a week over the past year, including news squibs and quickie record reviews. (Lufkin repeatedly urged Riff Raff to compare Selvin’s output with L.A. Times crit Robert Hilburn’s; we were reluctant—Selvin’s not in Hilburn’s league—but finally did, and discovered that … Hilburn writes three or four times as much as Selvin.)

Now, are these issues picayune? It’s not just getting little things wrong. To me they involve: Lassitude. Arrogance. Inaccuracy. Bad writing. Excuses. Intellectual dishonesty. And most importantly, inattention to, even a disdain for, facts or the truth in all manner of ways.

Now, the paper arguably got better in the 2000s, when it merged with the evening Examiner, which I think it’s fair to say had stronger reporters and higher standards. The editor who took over, Phil Bronstein, had a lot of detractors during his time there, but the paper did institute a corrections policy and he certainly cared more about building up a more muscular management, and I know from talking to him he was chagrined at some of the paper’s screwups.

And so every once in a while I would interview for a job there and end up dutifully writing an analysis of the arts section for them. For one, I remember, I was asked to read a week’s worth of issues of the arts section. In that stack I found exactly one story over seven days that featured reporting in any sense of the word. Everything else that wasn’t criticism was either a) based on a press release or b) a one-interview story blandly promoting the release of some cultural product. Such features are of course part of the mix in any big-city arts section, but the dogged refusal of the organization to be interested in things that hadn’t already been pre-approved and placed on a press release for the paper’s use was dispiriting.

The week culminated in a big story in the paper’s venerable Sunday “Pink Section,” its weekend arts insert, published on pink newsprint. The feature was about the SF Bluegrass festival, and it sure sounded like something you’d want to see. Unfortunately, nowhere in the story or in any of the surrounding editorial real estate did it ever vouchsafe to readers where or when the festival was actually taking place.

I went out on a limb in my critique and argued strongly that the paper include such information when writing about major cultural events.

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Right now it seems like the best thing that may happen to the Chron is that it will get taken over by Dean Singleton’s MediaNews chain. Singleton, over the years, has taken over just about every other surviving daily in the Bay Area, from waaay up in Marin to waaay down in Santa Cruz and Monterrey to waaay out in Pleasanton, an area that dwarfs, in terms of both geography and population, little San Francisco.

This would be a sad end for the Chron, because few have accused MediaNews of investing in strong journalism.

Or I suppose it could go out of business. One of the crazy aspects of the story is that Hearst, which is private, is not subject to the same pressures public companies are. (Indeed, given the restrictive terms governing the family heirs, notably Will Hearst III and his sister cousin Patty, the company’s board can basically do whatever it wants.) Why the company has tolerated the paper’s $1 million a week losses for so many years—or why, in this context, it arranged for the paper to be printed on massively expensive new presses during this period—is a mystery. You’d think that the directors have some sensible plan, but as time has gone on, it seems more likely they have just been inattentive or out of touch with the realities on the ground in SF.

Anyway, I just wanted to make one point. Jerry Carroll and Joel Selvin didn’t kill the Chron. The paper’s economic problems go back to languid management under the Thierot family; a JOA that meant it had to turn over half its income to the Examiner; and looking away as competing newspaper empires grew east and south of the city.

And then came the internet, and the vaporization of an industry’s business model, masterminded,  almost literally, in the shadow of the paper’s building south of Market in downtown San Francisco.

So Jerry Carroll and Joel Selvin didn’t kill the Chron. But people who have never lived in the city, as they watch this possibly calamitous event transpire, should be aware that the pair—and their editors—are part of the reason some people will not mourn it.