In what’s being criticized as a “deeply irresponsible and contemptible” publishing decision, the SF Examiner Wednesday front page depicted Supervisor Dean Preston with a bullseye target over his face, and the paper is now apologizing.

There’a school of thought in politics that the next election starts the day that the previous election ended, and that’s fine. By that thought, the SF supervisors in odd-numbered districts will be up for election on November 5, 2024, so their re-election campaigns are sort of already underway, as are campaigns to defeat them. As such, the SF Examiner on Wednesday ran a piece on a new political action committee determined to defeat District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston.

But that story has taken on a separate life of its own, not because of the reporting, but because of the image the Examiner used on its front-page coverage. As seen below, Preston is shown with a red bullseye superimposed over his face.

“It's still shocking to me that the Examiner would publish this," Preston told KTVU. "It's completely out of line.  Especially in this time with rising political violence and hatred."

The story itself is about a YIMBY-affiliated political action committee called Grow SF, who’ve started a new campaign called “Dump Dean” for that 2024 election. Grow SF did not place the bullseye on Preston, and probably had nothing to do with that editorial decision. But now the Examiner’s illustration has become a larger story than the PAC the article reported upon.

The Examiner is sorry, but not sorry enough to remove the image. You can still see it on the Examiner's online e-edition, though it now accompanied by the statement:  “Editor's note: The Examiner was contacted Wednesday by several readers about a bull's-eye image used for that day's front-page story about the efforts of GrowSF, a political action committee, to oust Supervisor Dean Preston, a Democratic Socialist who represents District 5. We apologize for that image. The Examiner in no way intended to connote or invoke violence against Preston or any other political leader.”

Today's Examiner print edition has the exact same apology at the bottom of Page Two.

KTVU also reached Examiner editor and publisher (and owner) Clint Reilly. "One of our artists did it without thinking. I think it was thoughtless and I apologize for it," Reilly said.  "The Examiner certainly doesn't advocate violence against any political figure, never has."

But it is not lost on people that the image was published in the wake of the Paul Pelosi attack, and Preston being Jewish, it also comes at a time when there’s more anti-semitism in the discourse of the MAGA era. And you don’t exactly need a PhD in history to know that there is a track record of supervisors being shot and killed in this town.

We are about two years into the Clint Reilly Era at the Examiner, and sometimes it shows that he’s historically more of a real estate guy than a media guy. He got rid of most of the Examiner’s legacy writers and editors to bring in his own team. And just as Elon Musk is learning at Twitter, when a new owner guts a company's staff, with the loss of experienced talent, the company might occasionally shoot itself in the foot.  

Related: D4 Supervisor Candidate Leanna Louie Calls Jewish Jounalist a ‘NAZI,’ As Her Candidacy Gets Fringier [SFist]

Image: @DeanPreston via Twitter

As tourism booms in San Francisco with a record 25 million visitors in 2015, the historic Hearst building at Third and Market Streets may seek to capitalize on the trend with a conversion from office space to hotel rooms.

Hearst, a media empire with investments in real estate and ranching, once owned The Examiner newspaper, which occupied the Hearst building from its completion, in 1911, until 1965. Hearst now owns the Chronicle, who had the the early word on the conversion plan, revealed in the form of a letter to current tenants of the 13-story, 120,000-square-foot, fully occupied building.

JMA Ventures, who converted an area of Ghirardelli Square into a Fairmont hotel and condos, will work with Hearst on the project. “People like to stay in a building with a story to tell,” Todd Chapman, a JMA Ventures partner, told the paper.

And the Hearst building does have stories. New York architects Kirby, Petit & Green designed the original building, which in the area at the intersection of Third, Kearny and Market Streets was once also home to The Chronicle and the now-defunct Call, earning it the nickname "Newspaper Angle."

Future Bars, a nightlife group who operate establishments like Bourbon & Branch, have already drawn inspiration from the Hearst building's past life with their bar in the building's basement, Local Edition, equally capitalizing on the hipster trend of typewriters as decor.

“People really latched onto it," Future Bars partner Brian Sheehy tells the Chron. "They love to be in a building with so much history.” Also in the building, Future Bars operates The Lark (formerly Dave's, RIP) and a spirits shop, Cask. All have long term leases and plan to stay on the premises.

via the Hearst Building

The conversion won't happen overnight — in fact, it could take years, as tenants were told. Though that leaves them time to find new space, such a task has never been more daunting in San Francisco. So far, JMA Ventures have met with Supervisor Kim and representatives of the hotel workers union, Local 2. And, if and when it arrives, the Hearst building won't be alone — more than 4,000 hotel rooms at 12 hotels are in the proposal pipeline.

Related: Record Number Of Tourists Checked Out SF Last Year Cause We're Hot Like That

The "Hearst eagle," a masthead symbol that still adorns the San Francisco Examiner, was created by William Randolph Hearst during the paper's prime as a flagship Hearst Media property. But these days, the eagle of the Examiner, which is now owned along with SF Weekly by the San Francisco Print Media Company, has been pecking at the Hearst Corporation and its local paper of record, the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Examiner sued the Chronicle in 2013 for allegedly offering discounted advertising rates to advertisers who would agree not to work with the Examiner. But after a drawn-out legal process in which the plaintiff, the Examiner, has presented little of its case for the defendant to view, an exasperated Superior Court Judge has ordered sanctions against the Examiner that will wound its case. Furthermore, the San Francisco Print Media Company must eventually pay Hearst's mounting legal fees.

According to the original complaint from the SF Print Media Company, "Hearst has demanded and obtained agreements from key advertising customers, which preclude those customers from purchasing any advertising space from the Examiner for a period of a year or more." The same play, after all, had worked for the SF Bay Guardian in a similar contest with the Weekly a few years earlier. The Guardian, which would go on to join the Weekly as an SF Print Media Company before eventually folding in 2014, won a high-profile predatory pricing case against the Weekly in 2008. That decision was upheld when the state Supreme Court refused to review a lower court ruling, and the Weekly was ordered to pay $21 million to its rival.

This time, as then, the case has maybe lingered for a while, but in this case the plaintiff isn't faring as well. The San Francisco Print Media Company's lawyers don't appear to have been forthcoming in the discovery process despite repeated orders from the judge. "Plaintiff's responses in the past, and those at issue now, are evasive and confusing," writes Judge Curtis Karnow. "They do not generally respond in a straightforward way to interrogatories."

Further, "Given the remarkable time and effort expended in these discovery disputes," Karnow writes that "I am not inclined to again order plaintiff to provide further responses; this would be futile... All I can do now, for responses which remain deficient, or in effect, empty, is to ensure that in fairness [Hearst] is not surprised in the future with further materials which the plaintiff ought to have provided by now."

By that, Judge Karnow means to indicate that he's imposing evidence sanctions. Any information the San Francisco Print Media Company does have but hasn't turned over during the lengthy discovery process can't be used at trial.

As far as attorneys' fees, which have no doubt swollen over the unnecessarily lengthy duration of discovery, Hearst "is clearly entitled to these fee shifting sanctions: plaintiff's positions, and many months of evasions and confusing responses, have without any justification imposed delay, and cost..." Judge Karnow will issue an order on those by April 19. The case returns to court on April 7.

Previously: S.F. Examiner Now Suing The Chronicle For Predatory Ad Pricing

In a move that should only make what goes on behind the scenes at San Francisco Media Company even more entertaining, the Examiner hired controversial sports pundit Jay Mariotti.

On Friday the paper announced that Mariotti would be hired "as sports director and columnist." Although he spent 16 years at the Chicago Sun-Times, he was known to a national audience via ESPN's show Around The Horn where participants were brought on to spout nonsense and get into shouting matches—a role fitting of Mariotti.

Mariotti's firebrand demeanor made him disliked by colleagues and the sports figures he covered. Former Chicago White Sox manager called Mariotti a gay slur, only to later apologize for the word he used but not for insulting Mariotti, adding, "I'm not going to back off of Jay." When Mariotti left the Sun-Times in 2008 to write for AOL, proclaiming that the print industry was dead, his former colleague and usually amicable Roger Ebert wrote a scathing column addressed to Mariotti titled "Jay The Rat." Sports columnist and radio host Dan LeBatard called Mariotti, in a Big Lead column that somewhat defended him, a "cartoon caricature" of sports pundits and said he was "loud, judgmental and wagging a parental, castigating and for-profit finger at the behavior of all those beneath him."

A 2010 domestic abuse incident and accusations of stalking his ex-girlfriend made Mariotti disappear from the sports media grid, leading him to lose his ESPN gig and getting suspended from AOL. He later plead "no contest" and used the opportunity to promote an e-book. His lawyer told the L.A. Times, "The fact that he is an accomplished writer provided him another avenue, in this case a book, to tell his side in an unconventional but progressive manner." Woof.

Regarding his legal issues, he told the Chronicle, "If people take the time to investigate the finality of this case, they will understand what truly happened and not judge me from false, reckless allegations from four years ago."

"A lot of this so-called reputation I have is smear crap from Chicago."

Since then, he's lived a quiet(er) life in Los Angeles and worked for Sports Talk Florida, but will be making the move north to make his Examiner debut in March. He briefly popped his head back up almost a year ago when he wrote The Ultimate Sports Take: a whole column telling President Obama to stick to the Real Issues instead of wasting his time with his NCAA bracket while also blaming himself for getting Obama elected. And to top it all off, he closed with the friendly reminder, "And, yes, the Malaysia Airlines jetliner is still missing."

As for the irony of joining an industry that he slammed the first time left it, how now thinks it's the future. "I am thrilled to develop premier content in a city overflowing with powerful sports stories while designing and planning a 21st-century presentation," he said in the Examiner's announcement.

Mariotti joins the San Francisco Media Company, which owns both the Examiner and SF Weekly, who is not-so-secretly shuffling its deck behind the scenes. They fired SF Weekly editor Brandon Reynolds in January and are now also dealing with the departure of food editor Anna Roth on Friday. Sources tell Eater that the Weekly had become an "increasingly toxic environment." In October, the SFMC shuttered the Bay Guardian after 48 years of publication.

The Examiner, as we mentioned, was recently sold to a news consortium led by Black Press Group, and taking over as publisher is San Francisco resident Todd Vogt. Today the paper announced that it will be doing away with its right-wing editorial pages, and will be taking on a more strongly local focus.

Then Vogt takes a second to shit-talk the Chronicle, just because he can. "San Francisco is a vibrant and thought-leading city,” says Vogt. “While the other newspaper in The City [sic] says it is local, it long ago stopped reporting on issues that truly matter to this dynamic community. Its lackluster approach to local news only highlights the bold approach The SF Examiner takes in selecting and presenting stories that speak to San Franciscans."

Meanwhile, Examiner scribe Mike Aldax, he of our favorite crime reporting with his liberal use of words like "goon" and "thug," hails the changes to the editorial section, which goes down to two pages in today's paper, and takes on a more local focus. "There were 4 pages of opinions, mostly anti everything liberal, and much of it angered our readership," Aldax writes on Facebook. "What was most concerning was how boring they were to read. I don't care what side of the fence you fall on.... Pretty much none of it was written by folks in our newsroom, certainly not by our reporters, mostly folks from Washington D.C. or Denver. Hopefully San Franciscans will appreciate this new step and recognize that our staffers only want to report compelling local news."

[Examiner]

The Examiner reported on Thursday night that they obtained a never-before-released police interview with the Brothers Kulbir and Amritpal “Paul” Dhaliwal regarding the 2007 Siberian tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo, which resulted in the death of 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr.. This exclusive report, released just in time for the third anniversary of the incident, promised a "tasty treat" in its headline, which turned out to be the fact that the three victims were eating nachos at some point before Tatiana the tiger escaped her enclosure and attacked them.

This revelation hardly has much relevance, as the article states: "The taped interviews, however, still do not reveal what happened that day, when police had to shoot the tiger to death after the attack." Inspector Valerie Matthews, who headed the investigation, questioned the brothers about whether they threw any nachos at Tatiana, but the two denied doing anything to taunt the tiger, whom Paul Dhaliwal referred to in his progressive lingo as a "fool."

In essence, an Examiner commenter (according to an SFist commenter) had the same scoop three years ago.

Holy Moses. SF Examiner columnist Ken Garcia has a fan.

SF Examiner has a very important report on what your San Francisco supervisors did during their three weeks off. A few of them did some pretty gay stuff; and one of them did what your SFist editor did during his summer vacations as a youth, literally.

Check it out:

• Board President David Chiu went to China. (Exotic!)
• Supervisor Bevan Dufty went to "Provincetown, R.I." [online edition correction "Provincetown, Mass."] (Because a well-fucked supervisor is an effective supervisor.)
• Eric Mar spent time in a mineral bath in Calistoga. (Refreshing!)
• David Campos went to LA and Cancun, Mexico (Sitting in traffic on the 405 will make one pine for bodyshots.)
• John Avalos body surfed at Huntington Beach, went fishing. (A supervisor after our own heart!)

We're not sure, exactly, what the others did. Maybe they had to go to summer session? Melissa Griffin has some ideas here.

Oh, and since our Day Around the Bay guest bloggers proved even more popular than we had imagined, please stay tuned month for a special block of Day Around the Bay featuring SF supervisors as guest editors. (Side note: for you supervisors who refuse to do it, we'll just have your sworn enemy guest blog for you. We're that serious.) We hope to round them up later this month, as soon as things percolate at City Hall after full meetings resume. (Thanks for the idea, Supervisor Chis Daly!)

by Chris Jones

So, you remember that old 1970’s movie, Logan’s Run, where Logan and Jessica 6 take a space shaped monorail pod thing to the bad part of the dome where they’re promptly assaulted by sassy gang members speaking the hip lingo of tomorrow’s youth? Well, according to today’s Examiner, it looks like everyone’s favorite public agency, the MTA, may be considering ripping out all the Muni buses in town and finally moving public transportation into the “Space Age” with our own Logan’s Run style public transit system just like we deserve. OK, not really. Apparently, the MTA recently entertained a pitch from Mountain View based Unimodal, Inc., proposing the installation of their SkyTran personal rapid transit (PRT) system as a total solution to the never ending problem of dragging people up and down Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue.

The SkyTran system consists of the above mentioned pod thingies, just big enough to fit two people (i.e., you and your sweetie, a prostitute and her john, Gavin and his hair, etc.), that are propelled along a fixed guideway using newfangled maglev technology from deepest space. Theoretically, the pods can reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour and, unlike buses, will show up to cart you and your plus one to dinner and a show whenever you please. Just ride the elevator to the PRT platform, press a button, and presto! Your own PRT pod arrives, free of smelly poor people and words like “jive turkey” scrawled all over the walls with a black magic marker.

Anti-reduce, reuse, recycler-er Justin Clarke, AKA SF Libertarian Examiner, would like to tell you something. He would like to tell you that Newsom's alleged plan to criminalize not recycling stinks worse than Ayn Rand's rotting corpse. "Whether you think that recycling is valuable or not (I vote not)," Clarke muses, SFPD shouldn't force you to recycle in the same way "that the police shouldn’t be in charge of getting you to change your underwear." (Which, for argument's sake, they SHOULD be in charge of you changing your underwear. That, and not wearing flip flops, forbidding you to wear Drakkar Noir, and to demand you take regular showers. Really, there's no reason the barrel of a gun should not enforce these rules.)

Clarke then evokes the memory of a "classic" 1968 article by E. W. Dykes page-turningly called “Demunicipalize the Garbage Service.” Which? Makes very little sense. Fortunately, Clarke spells it out for us. Ahem:

The point he is making is a good one - my breif synopsis hardly does it justice, and it is well worth a read in it's entirity. War is a state activity. Many would say that war is the health of the state and the ultimate expression of government, the naked use of force. Stopping that use of force on an international is extremely unlikely until we recognize its immorality on a local level. Telling the government to leave you alone when they order you to suit up and kill is as important as denying the government legitimacy when they assume the right to control what you do with your trash.

Again, we really have no idea what he's talking about. But this special brand of kooky can mean only one thing: SF Libertarian Examiner is our new favorite read.

What will journalists do after newspapers finally fold? Many things. Starting their own PR companies will be big. Writing for online internt weblog sites will tempt many. (Most, however, will fail to grasp the simple difference between the two mediums.) And some, well, will have to start small business ventures.

But a distinct few will take a stab at running for public office--Northern California's version of writing a screenplay. Take, for example, former Examiner Editor Adriel Hampton. He plans to run for Congress. How do we know this? Because he spammed SFist to beg for a regular column about his run for Congress. (Please don't do that, candidates. Just email us personally. Grumble.)

See what he says after the jump.

A former grant writer with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice was busted recently for violating civil-service laws -- an alleged conflict of interest that "could lead to fines and perjury charges against the ex-employee." According to the Examiner's Brent Begin, the unidentified one-time City Hall employee also consulted for Vanguard Public Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps fund other nonprofits focused on "social injustice." In the fiscal year 2008, the employee "was a paid consultant, Vanguard received $70,169 through an agreement with the Juvenile Probation Department." Begin goes on to report that "the year before, the nonprofit received $38,487 from The City, according to vendor payment summaries."

Oops.

Mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard went on to say, "OMG, no way! We had no idea! This is totally not tolerated and stuff!?" Or something like that.

Vanguard had no comment.

Shifting focus, this Examiner article brings up an interesting point. People bitched about the Ex as a decent local rag, but did the Chron get this story? Nope.

It just goes to show that the Chron isn't (and shouldn't) be your only source for good, well-rounded local news stories. As SFist commenter Robbie Peeler put it, "The Ex routinely beats the Chronny on local news." While a few out there think the Chron closing down is akin to the rapture, this just isn't the case.