Have no fear about the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Psmith would say, “The cry goes round—the SF Bay Guardian has been heard from!”

The Chron, for reasons I have detailed here, has a reputation as the least-distinguished daily at a major U.S. city.; as you might know, its owner, the Hearst Corp., has said that it’s losing $1 million a week and says it will sell it—or shut it down—if it doesn’t slow the losses.

Outsiders may not know that the Guardian, one of the two local weeklies, one-ups the Chron by being  probably the worst alternative paper in the U.S.*: It’s a ponderous and lunk-headed institution that combines a still-tenuous grasp of journalistic niceties (like not letting lines of text drop off from the bottoms of stories) with a reality-denying brand of political thinking that gives leftism a bad name.

Evidence? Consider its editorial on preserving the Chron, which Guardian watchers will savor for its deft handing of the facts of the case and its sophisticated rasp of corporate economics.

For example:

Hearst is complaining that the Chronicle is losing about $50 million a year. Of course, Hearst, a private corporation, won’t show anyone, even its own unions, its books.

Actually, in 2005, an auditor for the paper’s unions found that the paper lost “at least $62 million” in 2004. Given the climate facing newspapers in the years since (and particularly within the last few months) there’s little reason to think that the paper hasn’t been continuing to lose money at that rate or something close to it.** (Alan Mutter, in a blog post here, using actual facts, argues that it’s higher.)

But the Guardian doesn’t care about facts. The editorial continues:

We realize the newspaper business is rough right now, but we’re not convinced that running a daily paper in San Francisco is a doomed proposition. This is one of the wealthiest, best-educated markets in the world

The Guardian, you will note, having eliminated the $1 million a week losses from the discussion, doesn’t have to come up with a plan to deal with them. Part of the reason the Bay Area is so wealthy, of course, is the digital industry, which sprang up under the corporate noses of the Guardian and the Chronicle.

When the New York company [i.e., Hearst; the Guardian is playing the out-of-towners card here, though Hearst’s involvement in SF journalism via the SF Examiner goes back more than a century] bought out the deYoung Thieriot family in 2001, it sought to create a true monopoly by shutting down the Ex entirely. A local outcry, a lawsuit by Clint Reilly, and threats by federal regulators forced Hearst to sell the bones of the Ex to the Fang family, which essentially got the paper free and was given a $66 million subsidy to run it.

After darkly questioning the idea of losses, the Guardian even more darklier suggests the Chronicle was a would-be monopolist. You don’t have to feel sorry for a powerful company like Hearst to note the $66 million payment to the comically inept Fang family was wasted.

(For a time it was fun to look at the front of the Examiner in newspaper boxes and see how many typos you could spot in headlines and photo captions, just on the top half of the front page.)

The Examiner was traditionally a better paper than the Chron, but its value—its more competent, less lassitudinous staff—came over to the Chron at the time of the merger, and it is now barely a presence in the city.

The Guardian continues:

Now, after all this, Hearst is threatening to close shop and walk away, destroying hundreds of union jobs and wiping out a newspaper that is, by its nature, something of a public utility.

A more correct recitation of this might be,”After being forced to throw that $66 million away, being saddled with two newspaper staffs to put out one paper, dealing with the end of the dot-com bubble, and, now, a major recession, Hearst has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the paper, and, given the spiraling nature of the industry, no one seems to have a good idea of how to make money with it. Since the paper wasn’t that good anyway, San Franciscans won’t notice too much of a difference when MediaNews, which owns all the other daily publication in the Bay Area, takes it over, as seems likely.”

Instead, using its own internal logic, the Guardian has a solution:

The Chron unions have talked of an interest in buying the paper. Financier Warren Hellman confirmed to us that he supports creating a nonprofit entity to take over Chronicle operations. Hearst Corp., which has almost certainly already written off its $600 million purchase as a tax loss, should be forced to work with potential buyers — and give them a deal no worse than what the Fangs got in 2001.

If I read this correctly, the Guardian is saying that, since Hearst has lost $600 million (the Guardian is still not conceding any losses, which could bring the total to $1 billion) anyway, the company should give the paper to someone, along with at least $66 million more.

Finely argued debates on complex financial and social matters like this are what give San Francisco journalism its special flair.

* I worked at a competitor for the Guardian, the SF Weekly, in the 1990s, so readers are welcome to take my perspective on the paper with a grain of salt.

** One local SF union guy has made a convoluted argument on one of the Guardian’s blogs that Hearst wasn’t telling the truth in 2005 and that this is all a pot to bust the pressmen’s union; but the overall tenor of his complaints are a little … excitable, and I don’t believe him, at least on the point about the reality of the losses. Neither he nor, typically, the Guardian’s blogger asks the question of why the union didn’t challenge the figures back then.

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Previously in Hitsville

Why the SF Chronicle will not be mourned
Not mourning the Chronicle: The comments
Chronicle Watch