Lots of interesting comments and emails, pro and con, on my post on the SF Chronicle; the last one is a minor epic by Bill Mandel, one of the more thoughtful journalistic voices in town in the 1980s and 90s from his columnar perch at the SF Examiner.

Mark:

Good points all. While I love newspapers and am tormented by what I see happening to the industry and the careers of many friends, I can’t help but feel that many newspaper managements are, in effect, merely reaping the ill effects of what they’ve sown for years.

Yet, as imperfect as many of these institutions are, is there anything else on the horizon that might pick up their functions, whether it’s mirroring and defining a community’s sense of identity, or keeping a wary eye on local government officials. I don’t think so.

HV: The loss of the watchdog function of newspapers, which we’re hearing a lot of, is real, and I wouldn’t denigrate it, except to note that the ratio of watchdogging to the financial throw-weight of an average big city newspaper, say, fifteen years ago was very lopsided. The papers themselves would claim limited resources, but that of course just proves the point that it wasn’t a priority. (And I don’t even mean investigative reporting, just a focus telling people things they don’t already know.)

PJ Connolly:

Hammer, meet nailhead.

HV: I don’t know whether that is an insult or not.

Betty Medsger:

On the basis of your judgment of two arts writers who, you claim, didn’t produce much, you are willing to defame decades of work done by the entire Chronicle staff. And, suggest that the paper did little of value until the Examiner and the Chronicle merged. That superficial critique does a great injustice to the dozens of reporters, photographers and editors at the paper who, during those decades, did some excellent daily reporting and complex investigative stories. And who will do that kind of journalism if the Chronicle dies? We can hope it will come from new websites, ones that are more careful about facts and analysis than you were.

HV: In my defense, I was careful to note at the outset that the place had a lot of serious people. I went into detail on the people I did to try to make that case that the paper nevertheless didn’t hold others to basic journalistic standards. I hate to sound picky, but just because some people at a paper do excellent journalism doesn’t excuse permeating tolerance of the substandard. I’m not sure I have this all straight in my mind yet, but I have to say the issue nags at me: Are journalists as a class responsible for their downfall? Should they (we) have raised a ruckus?

And I also want to underline the fact that, for me and some others who comment here, there is a feeling that the Chron as an institution lacked certain journalistic genes. What exactly is wrong with the Chron has been a professional parlor game in San Francisco for decades. As Mandell discusses below, there was an arrogance to the paper, but it was matched by a tenuous connection to basic competence and standards.  This created that feeling, mentioned in my original post, of lassitude and indolence emanating from the paper.

Nance:

Right. So you didn’t like two writers among a staff of hundreds, therefore the paper is somehow stained and isn’t worthy of mourning. And you spent 2,000 words, give or take, to tell us this?

This is like these condemnations of the U.S. auto industry that all seem to go back to some guy owning a Chevy Vega that burned oil.

HV: There were a lot more than two. I concentrated on them because the paper’s years and in Selvin’s case decades of tolerance suggested something systemic at work. And don’t sneer at length; there’s too much glibness on the internet. I tried to make my case substantively.

Frank Grimes:

Boring. You sound like a real whiner. Carrol made a mistake, you are milking it. Big deal. You sound real BITTER.

HV: Thanks for taking the time to post.

Bill Mandel:

There’s a lot to be said for generalizing from small mistakes, so what does it say about this post that Will and Patty Hearst are not siblings but first cousins? (Surprise — in the next graf I praise your post, but you still have to get the facts right, right?) Will’s dad was WRH Jr., and Patty’s dad was Randolph Hearst, former publisher of The Examiner. Will, by the way, was extremely ahead of his time understanding the potential of the Internet, and has in the past 15 years become one of the most successful venture capitalists with the Tier 1 Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins.

Now, to get down to the heart of the matter: I was a daily columnist for the old Hearst Examiner from 1976 to 1994, leaving in 94 because I, like Will, saw that newspapers were doomed. I wanted to get into the Internet world, which I have. But I sure miss writing my column and heaving it read — and valued — by an assembled audience that had few places to turn for news and analysis. Selfish? Perhaps.

Anyway: Before Hearst bought The Chronicle in 2000, the Chron was by far the laziest, most self-satisfied organization imaginable. It exploited its right as a newsgathering monopoly, which meant it could get around to covering the news if and when it felt like it, or not at all. A lot of news happened that The Chron didn’t deign to cover. Ipso facto, it wasn’t news. The internal atmosphere was akin to a white shoe law firm. The newsroom had the atmosphere of a restricted men’s club. Feuds went on for decades. Certain writers didn’t talk to certain editors. Certain reporters were not obliged to come to work or even do any work. You complain about Selvin, but Joel is a writing machine compared to some old Chron retainers. (Liz Lufkin, by the way, went on to become an important editor at Yahoo News.)

The old Chron was brilliant in creating unique San Francisco flavor and atmospherics — Caen was magnificent, and then there were Stanton Delaplane, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, etc. It was the perfect thing to read over breakfast (or lunch, if you slept in), especially if you didn’t really care about the news. This was okay for folks who got their national and global news from The New York Times, but for folks who cared about San Francisco news — the real news, not just society goings-on & weird North Beach stuff — there was nowhere to go but The Examiner. The difference in circulation in the late 70s and during the 1980s was immense: The Chron was about 550,000, while The Ex was maybe 125,000. But the news coverage and good writing (save for The Chron’s star columnists) was in The Examiner, which we Examiner staffers always thought of as a cult newsletter for people who really needed to know, or cared to know, about what was happening in San Francisco.

Amazingly, whenever The Examiner uncovered a big story that The Chron didn’t have, The Chron simply ignored it. When a local magazine or weekly got a huge beat on a major story, The Chron ignored that, too. Examiner writers competed with The Chronicle, but The Chronicle never competed with The Examiner. And then there was that strange Sunday hermaphrodite, The Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, was was divided into news sections created by The Examiner and the fluffy stuff everybody read (Pink Section, Sunday Punch, etc.) created by The Chronicle. Examiner writers fought to get their best writing into the Sunday paper because all of a sudden we’d have 800,000 readers instead of 125,000.

The basic truth through all those years, up to the present, is that great writers stayed at The Examiner and then The Chronicle, whereas great editors moved on to New York or Los Angeles. Why? Because editors sit in offices, so they might as well sit in an office at The New York Times or L.A. Times. But writers go out into the communities they cover, and what better community to go out into than San Francisco and the Bay Area? So over the years, great writers and mediocre (and much worse than mediocre) editors stayed, and the result was what you wrote about.

I haven’t actually read The Chronicle for about a decade and don’t think I’ve missed anything. Even sfgate.com seems to be losing readability as staff cuts drain its news-gathering & editing capacity. It’s sad. There are numerous websites and blogs that now cover San Francisco in different & better ways, but it was a lot of fun for a lot of years to spread The Chronicle on the breakfast or lunch table or the bar and read it from front to back. It made one feel special about living in San Francisco. That I’ll miss.

HV: That’s an interesting theory, at the end there, about writers staying and editors leaving. It is a reductive but cherished Hitsville prejudice that editors should be held responsible for the content of any paper or magazine. It would make discussions about quality, accuracy and ethics a lot clearer.

Some Chronicle partisans might disagree, but I think that, a few gems like Caen and (I would say) Leah Garchik, for example, aside, the Ex people were better. You also have to give Will Hearst and then Phil Bronstein credit for creating the environment that brought in the paper’s pretty incredible late-80s/early ‘90s arts staff in, too, everyone from Michael Sragow to the impressive group of folks who started Salon: David Talbot, Gary Kamiya, Joyce Millman, Scott Rosenberg….

Joneg:

The criticisms of Carroll and Selvin and the Arts sections are fair but only the partial truth. Across the board, the Chronicle remains, even after a quarter century of steady improvement, one of the laziest major newspapers in America. This death threat may help Hearst finally clear the massive deadwood and bring in better journalists, but it’s doubtful, considering they installed an ex-Arizona hack as editor, Arizona’s papers being among the only papers worse than San Francisco’s. But the paper’s problem is largely the same as it is in every big city: fat lazy former monopolies that are too out-of-touch to compete in today’s marketplace.

HV: Hard to argue with any of that!