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Media
Prime-time propagandist
Is ABC's John Stossel a reporter or a right-wing apparatchik?
By David Mastio
[02/25/00]

Media
When bad shows become truly abominable
Who was the real victim of the "Multi-millionaire" hoax?
By Frank Houston
[02/23/00]

Media
No more Ms.-takes
By doing away with the arcane convention of courtesy titles for women, the Associated Press has finally joined the 20th, er, 21st century.
By Karyn Hunt
[02/10/00]

Brand X
Super Bowl ads: Winners and losers
Ad biz pooh-bahs at a New York party critique the good, the bad and the dot-coms in the industry's biggest showcase.
By Ruth Shalit
[01/31/00]

Alt
When good governments go bad
These pernicious moments brought to you by your elected leaders. PLUS: Sisterhood pyramid schemes, supermarket warfare and a man and his hooptie.
By Jenn Shreve
[01/21/00]

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For anyone who knew the Examiner well, the boastful label was more than ironic: It was delusional. The latter-day Examiner, despite a scrappy attitude and some talented staffers, was trapped in a low-circulation afternoon slot and stuck in a long-term decline. Even loyal readers who preferred it to its more staid morning competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, would shake their heads when you asked them what they thought the Examiner's prospects were. The paper was "monarch of the dailies" only in the sense that the legendary San Francisco eccentric Emperor Norton was monarch of the United States.

To be sure, San Francisco loves its delusional eccentrics -- and so Friday's news that the Examiner had been sold spread gloom through the town. To anyone who once worked at the Examiner -- as I, like the rest of the group that founded Salon, did -- the "Monarch's" fate, however inevitable and long-predicted, feels particularly insulting, a sort of l�se majest�, even if the majest� was a joke.

If Hearst had simply shut down the Examiner, the newspaper's family and friends could have held their wake and the world would simply move on. Instead, a kind of impostor paper looks likely to appear, at least for a few more years.

The sale was the final leg of a deal that had been brewing since last summer, in which the Examiner's owner, the Hearst Corporation, purchased the morning Chronicle from its squabbling family owners. That purchase was being held up by antitrust concerns; since the Chronicle and Examiner had shared facilities and profits since the 1960s under a complex, federally regulated joint operating agreement, any deal that led to a one-paper town might be blocked.

Last week's sale offered an end run around that issue. Now Hearst will run the Chronicle and offer the Examiner's staffers jobs there, while the Examiner's name and legacy will pass into the hands of the Fang family -- local businesspeople who have used their free newspaper, the Independent, as a political mouthpiece. That closes some kind of historical circle, since it was a similar kind of influence-seeking via unapologetic partisan journalism that William Randolph Hearst established as his trademark a century ago -- with the Examiner as his flagship.

By 1984, when Hearst's grandson, known as Will, took the paper's helm, the flagship had begun taking on water; circulation was sinking and quality had sunk. Will Hearst took a stab at invigorating the paper, expanding its staff and attempting to reach out beyond its traditional blue-collar conservative readership to the Bay Area's funkier and more progressive elements: He hired gonzo godfather Hunter Thompson as a columnist (and then needed to hire another editor just to turn Thompson's column into readable English); he added the absurdist brilliance of Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead" to the comics page. Sensing one of the weakest points of the competition at the Chronicle, he also beefed up the Examiner's arts coverage by hiring an energetic crew of young writers.

When I arrived at the Examiner in 1986 as its theater critic, I had my doubts: Wasn't writing drama reviews for the grandson of the original Citizen Kane asking for trouble? (If you remember the movie, Kane's paper's theater critic gets fired after panning a performance by "Kane"/Hearst's aspiring-actress wife.) But integrity was never a question at the Examiner: In close to a decade of reviewing plays and movies for the paper, I never once faced meddling or interference from on high -- even when the most influential theater producer in town, Carole Shorenstein Hays, called to complain that my review of an August Wilson play wasn't sufficiently positive, or when I found myself in the uncomfortable position of reviewing a film funded by Will Hearst himself.

Integrity, though, doesn't weigh very heavily on a balance sheet, and it was in the accounting department that the Examiner's fate would play out. Thanks to the joint operating agreement -- under which the Examiner and Chronicle split profits 50-50, no matter what -- the newspaper's performance bore little relationship to its profits. Quality was cleanly divorced from the bottom line.

The Examiner published four daily editions and held responsibility for most of the joint Examiner/Chronicle Sunday edition, requiring a 24-7 newsroom; the Chronicle, by comparison, kept banker's hours. Sunday gave Examiner staff their one shot at a decent-sized readership (around three quarters of a million on Sunday, compared with 100,000 to 120,000 on a typical weekday). But most Chronicle subscribers never quite understood that they were really reading an Examiner on Sunday, anyway.

Though the Examiner always took pride in offering better, tougher coverage of local politics than its competition, Chronicle readers loved their paper's columnists and didn't seem to mind that vast swaths of their morning reading were ripped off the New York Times and Washington Post wires. Both papers were cursed with a kind of stagnation that individual journalists might transcend but the entire institution was unable to shake.

Next page | Some editors cared about quality, others demanded obedience