San Francisco Chronicle

• 1. Introduction

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  The San Francisco Chronicle was born on the 16th of January 1865, not in a newsroom, but in the hands of two teenagers. Charles de Young and his brother Michael H. de Young launched The Daily Dramatic Chronicle with seed money of exactly twenty dollars, borrowed and spent on a gamble that the city needed a paper that spoke its language. Within a decade, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of the Mississippi River. How two boys with a borrowed gold piece built one of America's most durable newspapers is a story of ambition, rivalry, survival, and reinvention. What did it take to outlast every other San Francisco daily? Who were the writers, editors, and mavericks who shaped its voice? And how does a newspaper founded before the telephone survive into an era when print is a shrinking commodity?

• 2. A City and Its Paper

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  San Francisco itself was the Chronicle's first great asset. The paper's first office sat at the corner of Bush and Kearney Streets, and as the city grew, the paper grew with it. By 1880, it held the largest newspaper circulation on the entire West Coast. The de Young brothers commissioned an architectural landmark to match their ambitions. The building designed by Burnham and Root at 690 Market Street became San Francisco's first skyscraper. Completed in 1889, it anchored what became known as Newspaper Row. The 1906 earthquake damaged it, but William Polk, Burnham's San Francisco associate, oversaw its rebuilding. That structure, known as the Old Chronicle Building or the DeYoung Building, still stands today and was restored in 2007. It is now a historic landmark housing the Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences. In 1924 the paper commissioned a second headquarters at 901 Mission Street, designed by Charles Peter Weeks and William Peyton Day in the Gothic Revival style, anchoring itself in what is now the South of Market neighborhood.

• 3. The Newsroom's Boldest Years

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  Between World War II and 1971, editor Scott Newhall took the Chronicle in a direction few papers dared. Investigative reporting became a calling card. Pierre Salinger, who would go on to play a prominent role in national politics, filed work under Newhall's watch. Paul Avery pursued the trail of the self-named Zodiac Killer, a figure who sent cryptograms in three sections to the Chronicle and two other papers during a murder spree in the late 1960s. The paper was also home to an unusually colorful roster of columnists. Pauline Phillips wrote her nationally syndicated advice column under the name Dear Abby. Herb Caen became so identified with San Francisco that his byline was nearly synonymous with the city itself. Stanton Delaplane, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, Lucius Beebe, Terence O'Flaherty, and Marc Spinelli, who wrote as Count Marco, each brought a distinct voice. This period also saw the Chronicle overtake its chief rival, the San Francisco Examiner, to become the city's largest newspaper.

• 4. The Chronicle-Examiner Rivalry

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  The competition between the Chronicle and the Examiner took a serious financial toll on both papers. By the summer of 1965 a Joint Operating Agreement brought a truce. Under its terms, the Chronicle became the sole morning daily while the Examiner shifted to afternoon publication, a change that ultimately led to declining readership for the afternoon paper. The arrangement that governed them was intricate and lopsided. Both papers were nominally owned by the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which split revenue equally between the two. Since the Chronicle's circulation was four times larger than the Examiner's, the Chronicle effectively subsidized its rival. The two papers shared a single classified-advertising operation and produced a joint Sunday edition: the Examiner handled the news sections and the Sunday magazine, while the Chronicle contributed the entertainment section and the book review. This arrangement held until the Hearst Corporation took full control in 2000.

• 5. The Hearst Sale

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  On the 27th of July 2000, the de Young family sold the Chronicle Publishing Company to Hearst Communications for $660 million, a figure considerably above analysts' $500 million valuation. Hearst already owned the Examiner and, following the purchase, transferred that paper to the Fang family, publisher of the San Francisco Independent and AsianWeek, along with a $66-million subsidy. The Examiner became a free tabloid under the new arrangement. The Hearst era began with financial pressure that was already building. In February 2009, Hearst chief executive Frank A. Bennack Jr. and president Steven R. Swartz disclosed that the Chronicle had lost money every year since 2001 and more than $50 million in 2008. Without major employee concessions, Hearst threatened to sell or shut the paper, which would have made San Francisco the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The Chronicle had also sold KRON-TV (Channel 4), the Bay Area's third television station, which the de Young family had founded in 1949. That station was sold to Young Broadcasting in 2000 and became an independent station on the 1st of January 2002, after NBC purchased KNTV in San Jose from Granite Broadcasting Corporation for $230 million.

• 6. Circulation Collapse and Digital Pivot

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  Circulation peaked around the dot-com boom years of 1997 to 2001, then fell sharply. Between 2004 and 2005 the Chronicle's daily readership dropped by 16.6%, landing at 400,906. In May 2007 the paper fired one-quarter of its newsroom staff in a cost-cutting move. By October 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a 25.8% drop in circulation for the six-month period ending in September 2009, bringing subscribers to 251,782. That was the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper in the United States. Publisher Frank Vega said the decline was expected as the paper pursued higher subscription fees from a smaller reader base. The Chronicle ranked 18th nationally by circulation in the first quarter of 2021. On the digital side, SFGate registered 19 million unique visitors in January 2015, making it the seventh-ranked newspaper website in the United States. Across all platforms, the Chronicle would eventually reach 34 million unique visitors each month.

• 7. The Gate and the Web

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  On the 3rd of November 1994, the Chronicle launched SFGate, making it the first large-market newspaper website in the world. The site, co-founded by Allen Weiner and John Coate, had a soft launch in March 1994 and went official in November, during a Newspaper Guild strike; the union published its own news website, the San Francisco Free Press, whose staff joined SFGate when the strike ended. The site was known simply as The Gate at launch and eventually staffed its own columnists and reporters. It won a Pulitzer Prize for Mark Fiore's political cartoons. In 2013, the Chronicle launched a separate site, SFChronicle.com, and the two brands began a formal separation. By 2019, SFGate and SFChronicle.com were run as independent entities. SFGate drew 135.9 million pageviews and 25.1 million unique visitors per month, while SFChronicle.com drew 31.3 million pageviews and 31.3 million unique visitors per month globally.

• 8. Signatures and Traditions

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  The Chronicle's sports section, called Sporting Green, is printed on green-tinted pages and carries columnists including Bruce Jenkins, Ann Killion, Scott Ostler, and Mike Silver. Baseball coverage features Susan Slusser, the first female president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. The Sunday arts and entertainment insert, Datebook, has been printed on pink-tinted paper in tabloid format for decades. Its film rating system uses a cartoon figure known as the Little Man, seated in a movie theater chair, whose posture ranges from jumping and applauding wildly to being gone from his seat entirely. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it in 2008 as the only rating system that makes any sense. In January 2015, Audrey Cooper became the first woman named editor-in-chief of the Chronicle. On the 9th of November 2009, the paper became the first newspaper in the nation to print on high-quality glossy paper, used for some section fronts and inside pages. The paper's investigative team also produced work recognized with the 2004 George Polk Award for Sports Reporting, earned by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada for uncovering the BALCO scandal, which linked San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds to performance-enhancing drugs.