Phil Bronstein is the Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
In no small part thanks to Eve Batey (our "Editrix Emeritus" and the Chron's current blogging and interactive editor), Mr. Bronstein agreed to answer a few questions for us. His responses directly address issues brought up by SFist and SFist's readers a short time ago. Notably, you'll see from his answers below that he'd appreciate more of the same. Here's a chance to hear and be heard from one of the most important drivers behind news coverage in our area--and, for that matter, the country. See what he had to say to us below -- and let him know what you think.
1) We recently had a thread on SFist where we asked our readers "Why Aren't You Paying For The Chron?," and engaged in a little speculation on the topic ourselves. While they had some really interesting responses, we wonder how much weight, if any, responses like that are given by an institution like The San Francisco Chronicle.
About 30 or 40 pounds. A little less for Theo's view that our dreams are "hopeless and idiotic" -- though we hear you and still have hope for you -- than for Rita, who says SFist would be nowhere without the Chronicle. I'm thrilled Rita is volunteering as an Op-Ed columnist; we always need good writers who are also lawyers. I think we do take on "City Hall, transit, etc." and I pretty much get T's location/location point on local (and agree).
We’re having a tough time these days, as are many big dailies; a lot of good people’s lives are being affected. But the Chronicle will continue to be packed with talented journalists who will keep providing what Rita called “an essential public service.”
1b) Are SFist readers among your target audience, let alone those who choose to leave comments? A vocal minority? Something else?
If they weren't our target audience before, now that we know that SFist contributors and readers actually are interested in the paper, they are targets now. I read that post and those comments just minutes after they were posted. Honest. Ask Eve. And since the future of media and communications and technology is all speculation -- from uninformed to informed – some outside opinion is always worth reading. As a journalist, if you don’t, you might be suffering from that “higher calling disease," a professional hazard that I’d illustrate with what might be an apocryphal story: the reporter who can't take a call or answer an email from a reader because they're too busy "doing journalism."
So, tell me more about what you think we should be doing to better serve San Francisco. Because we’ll be changing over the next few months and feedback from people outside the building will be essential to making that change work.
After the jump: Has the Web changed readership habits? Where do blogs fit in?
2) With so much info out there, the Web seems to us to be well-suited for a quick-hits/short attention span format. Are these apparent sensibilities of webgoers spilling over to the sensibilities of the newsroom? To news readers? Is the Web changing the nature of the print product?
Yes.
3) While an ever-growing slice of SFist content is wholly original, much of it involves linking to other pubs' coverage and telling our audience about it--we serve a sort of tour guide role, with the added bonus of often strong opinions. Obviously, as the paper of record in town, a large percentage of our linkage comes from the Chron. Do you view this as: a) piggybacking other people's work; b) free advertising for your Web product; c) something else entirely?
Tour guide role? How about piracy. You should pay us. But it's more like a Johnny Depp kind of piracy -- having your pocket picked by a charming degenerate. Besides, we're not in a pay-for-use web world. If we were, newspapers would be making money.
I guess the added bonus part depends on how interesting the opinion is. But bloggers have it easier, in that respect, than we do -- in a lot of cases, if we show even a semblance of an opinion, there are people waiting to jump all over us. Sometimes people even see opinions when there aren't any. I hope you enjoy the luxury you have, as a blogger, to be able to tell your audience about a story and get to pose an opinion. We've got opinions, too, damnit.
Really, the answer is a little bit of a, b, and c. I agree that most blogs wouldn't exist without the MSM to kick around provide a starting place for their posts. And getting a link is always nice, as "free advertising" and because a portion of our business model is predicated on traffic, at least for now. And it's "something else entirely", because it gives us one more way to examine the work that we do, and to see it as part of a bigger context. That "what people have to say" thing (be that bloggers, commenters, or people who people who call us on the phone is really a big part of our craft. Journalists who think commenters and bloggers are just pesky irritants are missing the value and the point. An abiding curiosity and an open mind are the two major attributes journalists need to be successful. Oh, and an interest in people.
Folks, you heard the man, He said "So, tell me more about what you think we should be doing to better serve San Francisco." So have at it. Mr. Bronstein, we very much appreciate your time, attention, and candor; thanks for doing this.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
Phil,
You should get half pay because you only post half of the news and you slant the little bit you do report. Good journalism is built upon carefully crafted relationships with newsmakers on the front lines. I know of no one who likes you. But then, you're hardly on the front lines. Only scoops you get are cleaning out your cat's box.
h.
I think that Bronstein and Clint Reilly should fight it out in public and give away tickets to any blogger or blog reader who starts a new subscription.
I also think the paper should be free and I would have asked about the time Phil lost a fight against a dragon.
Suggestion?
Stop posting n stories about Paris Hilton, and the accompanying 4 polls about what we all think of her incarceration. That doesn't belong in a newspaper.
Gee, why on God's Green Earth should I pay to read the SF Chronicle's daily corporate propaganda for the Bush crime family? The dear old Chron took the big right-wing plunge in the 21st c. with their constant cheerleading and coverups for the Bush election thefts (2000, 2002, 2004), the Bush imperial war of fascist aggression on the Iraqi people and the Bush gang's assault on our Constitution, our Bill of Rights and our tradition of protecting civil liberties.
Just like the Wash. Post, the NY Times, Fox"news", ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, the Chronicle has been taken over by right-wing goose-stepping idiots in support of our imperial military occupation of most of the rest of the world.
Maybe we should try looking at world and the USA though the eyes of an Iraqi or an Afghani. It looks a lot like traditional western imperialism...
I occasionally pick up the Chron, and am amazed how they fit so little content into so much paper.
Considering I can get the Times delivered in SF and pick up the weeklys for free, I can't imagine why I would want to pay for the Chron.
errr....at least for now? i've been racking my brain for a good 30 seconds now and i can't for the life of me understand how it could be predicated on anything else. even if they go the WSJ subscription model, it's still traffic based.
phil, here's a tip:
make the subscriptions affordable. it's ridiculously expensive to subscribe. and your discount packages are bizarre - like wed thru sun papers??? how about a sunday only subscription or a weekday only?
the reason it's a problem for you is this - i used to subscribe when i had about 10 roommates and could split it. now i don't and so i don't subscribe. down the street is an examiner stand so i grab that. sure, it's not as good, but hey, it's free. but even worse for you is that since i've stopped subscribing, i've found great "tour guide" blogs to point out the important stuff. so now i don't have to even go to your website, i just come here, click a couple links then go grab the free examiner.
if, say, i could get an annual subscription for a token amount (say, $25 or $50), then i'd totally subscribe. lemme know.
another tip and i can't type this loudly enough:
NO MORE WEATHER ON THE FRONT PAGE UNLESS IT'S A NATURAL DISASTER!!!
That's not news and we all know when it was hot or rainy yesterday so you don't need to report it, especially not on the front page. There's lots going on in the world for you to choose from to pick up the slack.
"and your discount packages are bizarre - like wed thru sun papers??? how about a sunday only subscription or a weekday only?"
There are Sunday only subscriptions. And Daily too (Mon thru Sat). And yes, Wed thru Sun and Fri thru Sun. I agree that the rates a little wacky though.
More local news, please.
After Matier & Ross sensationalized the critical mass debacle, I wrote them a blank email with the subject of "you guys suck."
They responded by spelling my name wrong. I guess they were "too busy doing journalism" to spell it properly.
How can I trust what a paper has to say if they can't correctly report how names are spelled?
Gee, I didn't know Phil Bronstein had anything to do with the Chronicle. I thought he was famous because he used to be married to Barbra Streisand, but got a divorce because she was having a secret affair with Cher or Oprah or somebody like that.
As far as the Chronicle goes, I only read it when I get it as a free left over on a BART seat [as long as I'm pretty sure that the previous owner had not used it to sneeze into.] Since they print a ton of stuff lifted from the New York Times, I just read that paper. It's fun because every day the NYT prints a couple of words that are so obscure that only an English prof knows what they mean without looking them up. It's also so kewl that they refer to everyone as, "Mr." or "Ms."
The Chron might fair better if it put a stronger emphasis on local news, and perhaps run a little less wire copy. It seems like the Chron is going through a bit of an identity crisis: It wants to be a national paper, with its DC and foreign desks, but it can't compete with the NY Times or the Washington Post. To be fair, those desks are very good, but it needs to make up its mind. If it wants to be a nationally regarded paper like it once was, it needs to spare no expenses. If it wants to appeal itself to a local market, it needs to cut its losses and clearly define its readership.
The inside of the A section is mostly news from other sources, most of which people can read on the Web for free (AP stories on Yahoo, for example), or get directly from the source (a lot of people in SF subscribe to the Times), so it seems like a waste of paper. Why would anyone feel the need to pay for that?
Bring back the San Francisco section -- people want local news. That's why the Examiner is successful despite it's sometimes mediocre copy.
If and when the Chron can figure out it's role in the new media world, I think it can be a really good paper. There are some top-flight journalists there, and the paper has done some excellent local investigative work; The Use of Force series comes to mind.
The Web site could use a boost, too. It's a little mind boggling that the Chron isn't leading the multi-media charge when Silicon Valley is just a stones throw away.
But as long as newspapers are beholden to Wall Street profit margins, the bottom line will never be enough to satisfy investors. More papers would do well to emulate the St. Petersburg (Fla.)Times model, I think: make it a non-profit.
And one more thing: Enough with Alicia's Story. Look outside of the newsroom for, well, news!
I'll second what Nad and others have said. More local news! And I mean real local news, not the petty crap you've been printing recently like "where are the whales now?" and "Newsflash: some bicyclists are assholes."
Honestly, the weeklies have more reliable and hard-hitting investigative journalism than I've ever seen in the chron. Not to mention much, much, much better coverage of local arts and cultural events. Oh yeah, they're also free.
If you tried to be a more politically neutral daily version of the guardian, you'd probably be much more successful (and politically neutral does NOT mean "shill for downtown interests").
Basically the only thing you have going for you right now is a regular column on architecture.
If you do a make over on Susan Sward I might subscribe again, seriously she's starting to look like Charles Bukowski (on one of his bad days).
Where would I be without my morning crossword puzzle, my Sudoko and the Lio comic strip?
Oh, and Paul Madonna. That man's a genius.
Yes, that's why I buy the Chronicle.
The Lio comic strip is da bop.
Any publication that pays a living wage to Debra Saunders, Carolyn Lochhead and the ineffable Andrew Ross deserves to die. Watching it rot away has been interesting and the Bay Area will only be the better for its gradual disappearance.
Bronstein was actually a wonderful investigative journalist, particularly when he was working out of the Philippines during the overthrow of the Marcos regime, but as an editor he's been an arrogant, neoconservative disaster.
Phil:
Thanks for asking. I just reluctantly cancelled my subscription so let me share my likes and dislikes.
* More reporting holding politicians accountable and fewer puff pieces about the mayor. Time to call out not only the mayor but Ammiano, Mirkarimi, Peskin and expose them as the frauds and enemy of the working people of this city
* Cut it with all the victimization crap all the time i.e. Shame of our City, etc. Lets do something real about these homeless people rather than just making them out to be victims - and I'm not talking about another "program"
* Cut it with Alicia's Story - now matter how tragic and heroic her experience may be, this is not something that one would expect from a daily from a purported "major city"
* Fire Gwen Knapp - this is a sports page, not an ethics column - it seems like most of her columns are finger wagging lessons in morality. If I want that kind of self-righteous crap, I can find it anywhere
* John King - always a great read, interesting, thought provoking material
* Food Section - generally a good read, a little predictable at times
* Matier and Ross - generally a good read and amusing
Finally, this city deserves better than the sensation slanted reporting by your folks. I know they think they have a "higher calling", but cut it with all the crap and start writing stories that impact the people of this city and make it a great place. After all, it is yours and their jobs on the line.
How about a piece calling out the citizenry for tolerating the filth and disgust that is called The Haight? How about calling out the mayor for tolerating this filthy neighborhood? How about writing a few pieces on why we have the most bloated bureaucracy in the region coupled with the most inefficient city services?
Althrough Bronstein does write:
he really doesn't address how the Chronicle can become a better paper with such a huge reduction in editorial staff.
Yes, it might cut the losses a bit in the short term, but it will hurt the paper in the long term.
Will the Chronicle still be around in 2065?
Yes, there probably could have been some cuts (though there have been buyouts and other cuts before), but not on this scale.
As former deputy managing editor John Curley (someone who understood and participated in both internet and San Francisco culture and sometimes gave us a window into how the paper was created) wrote:
If the Ed Jew scandal had broken in July instead of May would the Chronicle have the resources to have five reporters (and however many editors) to cover the story.
Will there be enough reporters, photographers, and editors to cover the campaign for mayor when Newsom gets a real challeger. Not to mention 2008 campaign at all levels from Washington DC to district elections.
As Marc Sandalow (I can understand having him take some time off to write his book on, but it seems he should come back by 2008 to cover if she'll remain Speaker) wrote in his farewell e-mail:
There are lots of ways the Chronicle could be better both in print and online. But most of them require staff and resources.
In a city like San Francisco, independent films and documentaries shouldn't be relegated to short clips (which can help lead to short runs).
But I imagine you'll have even fewer critics soon to write about the films which aren't over-hyped Hollywood blockbusters.
The Chronicle is one of the few papers smart enough not to charge for your archives (at least going back to 1995 - though they really should go back to 1865 by now).
The problem is they aren't organized in a useful way. There should be pages with all your stories on Ed Jew (not just a box with stories going back to May 18th), Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and other local politicians.
The way sfgate presents videos on stories
and in this section could be so much better. There should be a way to subscribe to all videos (just like with podcasts) as well as embed videos.
There is much more, but it is late.
There's a missing word in all of Bronstein's comments, and that is the word "news." This is startling and telling. The Chron is supposed to be a newspaper, but there's opinion, features, food recipes, and columns. But there's precious little news. Perhaps with the Chron's reduced resources, it will concentrate its future on returning to what made it once a great newspaper, and give us news.
I been reading the SJ Mercury and my brain hurts from all the thinkin I been doin.
I been readin the SJ Mercury and my brain hurts from all the thinkin I been doin.
I was recently in san fran for a week on vacation and read the chronicle every morning at my hotel. And in all honesty I was freaking amazed at how terrible the paper is. I just assumed that a city the quality of san fran would have a quality paper, but I found that not to be the case. It reminded me of many generic southern papers I'm familiar with: light local reporting, a ton of wire service stories, and poor editorial decision-making. I distinctly remember one day when the chron ran a front-page COLUMN on the Paris hilton jail ordeal, then featured a FULL PAGE inside dedicated to the story. What a sad state of affairs. Contemplating the fact that this paper will be getting even worse due to staff cuts is scary. A paper of this quality would die out in a month in any large east coast city.
Most of the comments here seem to focus on all the braindead stories that are featured in the Chron. I would guess this is a sound business decision: when you look at the most popular articles list it's always things like Paris Hilton, a lady in the midwest that had octuplets, or the horoscope. Sadly, it appears that in this relatively small city there just aren't enough intelligent people for real news to be profitable. I guess it's the less sophisticated readers that make the paper money, and perhaps lots of in-depth and unbiased analyses of happenings at City Hall, groundbreaking coverage of local social issues, etc. would turn all those readers away.
Yeah, more local *news* would be great.
F* the Chronicle, and f* their stupid corporate masters. They put out a sh*tty product that now can't compete. So now they're losing jobs. Boo f*ing hoo. Good. I hope all of them lose their homes and go bankrupt. Better yet I hope they give up and jump off the f*ing bridge.
F* their "blogs" too. They're just buying off local people with a few pennies, with the aims of sucking traffic away from indie media and citizen journalism and back to the masters at Hearst, Inc.
F* that, and f* anyone who buys into their bullshit.
Ed: slightly sanitized. We think you still get the idea.
How about a piece calling out my household for tolerating the filth and disgust that is generated by my roommates? How about calling out the mayor for tolerating this filthy apartment? How about writing a few pieces on why we have the most cluttered flat in the building coupled with the most inefficient chore schedule?
More local news!
Post everything online first. X times a day, print your home page as the paper's front page: A bunch of boxes touting stories from every section (yes, including weather). Use Website traffic to help you gauge what your readers want, then give it to them. The home page has replaced the front page as the prevailing media metaphor, so make your paper look like one. And, yes, make do with wire feeds for international/national, but make sure you have the best local, regional, and state reporters you can get.
my brain still hurts. time to read the sf comical.
doesn't anybody remember that line from "All The President's Men"? dissing the chronicle? wtf was that movie made? sf comical, a joke forever.
what do you expect from a society rag anyway?
when the fuck what that movie made?
brain... still hurts...
yada yada, Chron sucks, cliche cliche. isn't the best part of this Internet gizmo that anyone--including every poster and reader on this board--can now publish their own news? right? so, instead of hating on tha chron (after all, it's a free web site), why not buck up and DIY. if y'all got the answers to what people *really* want to read, why not publish it? publish and they will come. isn't that what Kevin Costner said?
Nice to see so many well-educated folks here on SFist. As we all know, "The News" creates itself. It's like the air...it's just there. It's not as though anyone has to work full-time to produce it...those losers at the Chronicle (who are so much stupider than we are! Anyone could do their jobs! ) are only there to make sure that all news serves the interests of the Bush Crime Family!
Just to add to what's been said - I can't stand the look of the Chronicle - honestly - there are some excellent writers on Staff (and why an idiotic Republican columnist with a perpetual smirk is the best known of them I'll never know)
but the front page makes it look like a casual lifestyle paper. It's worse than a tabloid.
What makes a newspaper a newspaper is, well news. Not home and gardening; not food, not wine. NEWS. The Chronicle is aimed at a fifth grade reading level when in fact it serves a population with one of the highest levels of education in the nation. When the Cronicle stops insulting my intelligence and starts reporting the news with in depth analysis, complex sentence structures and - woa! - whole paragraphs of information - I'll subscribe.
That's why I take the NY Times and not the Chronicle.
I would echo Raymond's comments above and add that while I spend only twice as much daily (well, $5 vs. $1.50 on Sunday) for the NYT as opposed to the SFChron, I seem to get about eight times as much news out of the former.
The Chron still has an estimable Washington bureau; it will never break as many stories as those papers with larger D.C. staffs, but there's no reason there can't be more in-depth articles on national politics, especially on Sunday, much like The Economist does so well weekly. The arts staff is a fine one, I think - why not more lengthy articles that examine current issues and trends in music, dance, art, film and television? (The current focus on decreasing the word count of articles bothers me tremendously... if a subject calls for intensive treatment, it should receive it.) And in-depth local investigative journalism will always be the special province of print outlets, I suspect.
A newspaper no longer is the same creature it was in the days when there were five-star extras. It provides context to large stories in the way the weekly newsmagazines did pre-cable, when there was a longer news cycle, and it can dig into matters of local interest with hard research in ways television stations, who are necessarily dependent on powerful images, cannot. If I want wire stories, I can get them anywhere. What I want is original writing that doesn't have to break news, necessarily - it just has to think about it, and convey it, in a way that gives me a new perspective or enlarges my vision.
I am an East Coaster who has been very pleased with the coverage the Chronicle has devoted to of the arrest of child psychiatrist Dr. William Ayres, for molesting young boys in his practise.
John Cote, the reporter, did an excellent job. A couple of my friends are victims of Ayres, and they have been very happy with the local coverage of this story (which has gone national - the NY Times has done a story on it) and would like to see more.
I just hope they don't eliminate the job of John Cote, who does a great job covering the Peninsula.
Heather -
All the Presidents Men came out in 1976.
Thanks for soliciting our opinions Phil. There is pretty much of a knee-jerk Chron sucks attitude of most people in SF about the paper but I think the negativism about the paper runs even deeper. I was at a talk a couple of years ago in SF in which Tim Russert was the guest speaker. Russert mentioned a number of the newspapers he reads every day to prepare for his broadcast. I asked him a question from the audience later and prefaced it by noting that he hadn't mentioned the Chronicle. Quite a few people laughed but what was even more instructive was Russert's subsequent response which was "Well, the Mercury News is a pretty good paper."
My suggestion: Let different folks who have so much criticism of the Chron have at you guys a couple of times a week on the op-ed pages. If someone thinks you mishandled a news story or overhyped a feature (Can you say 39-part series on wine?) or have taken an absurdist opinion position or don't think you have any business poking your head into grand jury proceedings in order to break a baseball story, or whatever, give them a forum and make the Chron come alive interactively.
As a reader of your paper since 1964, I found that your paper at that time had more local news, which as a college student, I read and enjoyed. Today, it seems that much of your news is repeated news, which we see on television over and over.
California and San Francisco have a lot of things happening, but much of these things never reach the paper. Don't you have stringers to cover these stories, when your regular reporters are busy?
You have a stringer since 1991, who has sent in news from the Sierra foothills, which is in your reading area, and the stories never received print. As an example, a bus, carry children from the Bay Area, crashed two weeks ago. Many children were hurt...where was the story? A story was sent into the paper, by this same stringer, about two teenagers, who cut school and tried to go swimming, but they were chased by a mountain lion and returned to school...where was the story? To me these are interesting stories about events that happened in your local reading area that are not covered.
Instead, the paper was full of Hollywood stories that have been hashed out over, and over, and over in your paper and in many papers. There is now one item, in your paper, that I enjoy reading and that is "Outdoors". You have one writer that is enjoyable to read and another that seems to be okay,if he keeps to the subject and does not go off on a tangent about something else.
This stringer has a blog for a hotel group out of Canada, www.hotelsbycity.net, go to hotel blog, then foster city, under the title fostercityblogger1. You can see many of the articles that he has written about your reading area and the Bay Area.
I think, this my opinion, that you should forget about stories that will not sell the paper and print stories that will sell your paper; and that is, more local stories that are breaking in your reading area, which is not just San Francisco.
Phil Bronstein was named editor of the San Francisco Examiner in 1993 and presided over the paper's slow decline in both quality and readership. He blamed the joint operating agreement and the fact the Ex was an afternoon paper.
Phil Bronstein was named editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000 and has presided over the paper's slow decline in both quality and readership. He has blamed Craigslist, the collapse of the tech bubble, the rise of the Internet as a source for news and, most recently, the popularity of blogs.
Phil Bronstein is too narcissistic, too arrogant or too stupid -- or perhaps all three -- to realize that he is a BIG part of the problem. He is an ineffective, incompetent leader who does not have the respect of his staff or the community he purports to serve. It is a fact that he is known more for marrying Sharon Stone and being attacked by a lizard than for any journalistic contributions he has made during a career that can only with the utmost generosity be called average at best.
Now, almost 100 people have been forced out of their jobs in no small part because of Phil Bronstein's incompetence.
If Phil Bronstein had any integrity whatsoever, he would resign in solidarity with, and out of respect for, the people whose careers he has helped ruin. His staff has served him with far more dedication, talent and professionalism than he has ever shown.
It is time for him to go.