San Francisco News Blues

SAN FRANCISCO NEWS BLUES
[SOURCE: American Journalism Review, AUTHOR: Paul Farhi, Washington Post]
The San Jose Mercury News used to have more than a dozen reporters in its San Francisco peninsula bureau located about 15 miles from San Jose. Now there's just one. The Merc gets most of its peninsula news from the short-handed San Mateo Times and the Palo Alto Daily News, a free tabloid MediaNews acquired in the Knight Ridder deal last year. Some parts of the paper's newsroom have simply just disappeared, among them a five-member projects team that included 40-year Merc veteran Pete Carey, who was part of a group that won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting in 1986. Carey is now a business reporter. Some 40 miles north of the Mercury in San Francisco, another newspaper is undergoing its own wrenching contraction. In mid-May, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Bay Area's largest paper (daily circulation: 386,564), announced it would reduce its editorial staff. When the numbers were finalized a few weeks later, 90 journalists (23 percent of the Chron's newsroom) had either simply resigned or agreed to take buyouts offered by the paper's owner, Hearst. Among those who've recently left the paper are Managing Editor Robert J. Rosenthal, two deputy managing editors and the editors of the paper's opinion, business and Style sections.
http://ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4404