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The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the
San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area G ...
of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers
Charles de Young Charles de Young (January 8, 1846 – April 23, 1880), along with his younger brother M. H. de Young, founded the newspaper The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, which became the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', and was its editor-in-chief. He was murdered b ...
and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco. The paper benefited from the growth of San Francisco and had the largest newspaper circulation on the West Coast of the United States by 1880. Like other newspapers, it experienced a rapid fall in circulation in the early 21st century and was ranked 18th nationally by circulation in the first quarter of 2021. In 1994, the newspaper launched the SFGATE website, with a soft launch in March and official launch November 3, 1994, including both content from the newspaper and other sources. "The Gate" as it was known at launch was the first large market newspaper website in the world, co-founded by Allen Weiner and John Coate. It went on to staff up with its own columnists and reporters, and even won
Pulitzer Prize for Mark Fiore's political cartoons
In 2013, the newspaper launched its own
namesake A namesake is a person, geographic location, or other entity bearing the name of another. History The word is first attested around 1635, and probably comes from the phrase "for one's name's sake", which originates in English Bible translations ...
website, SFChronicle.com, and began the separation of SFGATE and the ''Chronicle'' brands, which today are two separately run entities.


History

The ''Chronicle'' was founded by brothers Charles and
M. H. de Young Michael Henry de Young (September 30, 1849 – February 15, 1925) was an American journalist and businessman. Early life De Young was born in St. Louis, Missouri. The family was Jewish. Michael in later years claimed that his father was a Balt ...
in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'', funded by a borrowed $20 gold piece. Their brother Gustavus was named with Charles on the masthead. Within 10 years, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of the
Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem), second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest Drainage system (geomorphology), drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson B ...
. The paper's first office was in a building at the corner of Bush and Kearney Streets. The brothers then commissioned a building from Burnham and Root at 690 Market Street at the corner of Third and Kearney Streets to be their new headquarters, in what became known as Newspaper Row. The new building, San Francisco's first skyscraper, was completed in 1889. It was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, but it was rebuilt under the direction of William Polk, Burnham's associate in San Francisco. That building, known as the "Old ''Chronicle'' Building" or the "DeYoung Building", still stands and was restored in 2007. It is a historic landmark and is the location of the
Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences The Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences is a luxury residential skyscraper in the Financial District of San Francisco, California. The residences are built atop the historic Old Chronicle Building, sometimes called the de Young Building, which ...
. In 1924, the ''Chronicle'' commissioned a new headquarters at 901
Mission Street Mission Street is a north-south arterial thoroughfare in Daly City and San Francisco, California that runs from Daly City's southern border to San Francisco's northeast waterfront. The street and San Francisco's Mission District through which it ...
on the corner of 5th Street in what is now the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco. It was designed by Charles Peter Weeks and William Peyton Day in the
Gothic Revival architecture Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...
style, but most of the Gothic Revival detailing was removed in 1968 when the building was re-clad with stucco. This building remains the ''Chronicle''s headquarters in 2017, although other concerns are located there as well. Between
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
and 1971, new editor Scott Newhall took a bold and somewhat provocative approach to news presentation. Newhall's ''Chronicle'' included investigative reporting by such journalists as Pierre Salinger, who later played a prominent role in national politics, and Paul Avery, the staffer who pursued the trail of the self-named " Zodiac Killer", who sent a cryptogram in three sections in letters to the ''Chronicle'' and two other papers during his murder spree in the late 1960s. It also featured such colorful columnists as Pauline Phillips, who wrote under the name " Dear Abby," "Count Marco" (Marc Spinelli), Stanton Delaplane, Terence O'Flaherty, Lucius Beebe, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, and
Herb Caen Herbert Eugene Caen (; April 3, 1916 February 1, 1997) was a San Francisco humorist and journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, and offbeat puns and anecdotes—"A continuous love le ...
. The newspaper grew in circulation to become the city's largest, overtaking the rival '' San Francisco Examiner''. The demise of other San Francisco dailies through the late 1950s and early 1960s left the ''Examiner'' and the ''Chronicle'' to battle for circulation and readership superiority.


Joint operating agreement

The competition between the ''Chronicle'' and ''Examiner'' took a financial toll on both papers until the summer of 1965, when a merger of sorts created a Joint Operating Agreement under which the ''Chronicle'' became the city's sole morning daily while the ''Examiner'' changed to afternoon publication (which ultimately led to a declining readership). The newspapers were officially owned by the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which managed sales and distribution for both newspapers and was charged with ensuring that one newspaper's circulation did not grow at the expense of the other.
Revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive rev ...
was split equally, which led to a situation widely understood to benefit the ''Examiner'', since the ''Chronicle'', which had a circulation four times larger than its rival, subsidized the afternoon newspaper.Gorney, Cynthia Gorney (January/February 1999)
"The State of The American Newspaper – The Battle Of the Bay"
. ajr.org. '' American Journalism Review''. Retrieved November 17, 2012.
The two newspapers produced a joint Sunday edition, with the ''Examiner'' publishing the news sections and the Sunday magazine, and the ''Chronicle'' responsible for the tabloid-sized entertainment section and the book review. From 1965 on the two papers shared a single classified-advertising operation. This arrangement stayed in place until the Hearst Corporation took full control of the ''Chronicle'' in 2000.


Push into the suburbs

Beginning in the early 1990s, the ''Chronicle'' began to face competition beyond the borders of San Francisco. The newspaper had long enjoyed a wide reach as the de facto " newspaper of record" in Northern California, with distribution along the Central Coast, the Central Valley, and even as far as
Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the isla ...
, Hawaii. There was little competition in the Bay Area suburbs and other areas that the newspaper served, but as Knight-Ridder consolidated the '' Mercury News'' in 1975; purchased the ''Contra Costa Times'' (now '' East Bay Times'') in 1995; and as the Denver-based Media News Group made a rapid purchase of the remaining newspapers on the East Bay by 1985, the ''Chronicle'' realized it had to step up its suburban coverage. The ''Chronicle'' launched five zoned sections to appear in the Friday edition of the paper. The sections covered San Francisco and four different suburban areas. They each featured a unique columnist, enterprise pieces, and local news specific to the community. The newspaper added 40 full-time staff positions to work in the suburban bureaus. Despite the push to focus on suburban coverage, the ''Chronicle'' was hamstrung by the Sunday edition, which, being produced by the San Francisco-centric "un-''Chronicle''" ''Examiner'', had none of the focus on the suburban communities that the ''Chronicle'' was striving to cultivate.


Sale to Hearst

The de Young family controlled the paper, via the Chronicle Publishing Company, until July 27, 2000, when it was sold to Hearst Communications, Inc., which owned the ''Examiner''. Following the sale, the Hearst Corporation transferred the ''Examiner'' to the Fang family, publisher of the '' San Francisco Independent'' and '' AsianWeek'', along with a $66-million subsidy. Under the new owners, the ''Examiner'' became a free
tabloid Tabloid may refer to: * Tabloid journalism, a type of journalism * Tabloid (newspaper format), a newspaper with compact page size ** Chinese tabloid * Tabloid (paper size), a North American paper size * Sopwith Tabloid The Sopwith Tabloid an ...
, leaving the ''Chronicle'' as the only daily broadsheet newspaper in San Francisco. In 1949, the de Young family founded
KRON-TV KRON-TV (channel 4) is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, KRON-TV maintains studios on Front Street in the c ...
(Channel 4), the Bay Area's third television station. Until the mid-1960s, the station (along with KRON-FM), operated from the basement of the ''Chronicle'' Building, on Mission Street. KRON moved to studios at 1001 Van Ness Avenue (on the former site of St. Mary's Cathedral, which burned down in 1962). KRON was sold to Young Broadcasting in 2000 and, after years of being San Francisco's NBC affiliate, became an independent station on January 1, 2002, when NBC—tired of Chronicle's repeated refusal to sell KRON to the network and, later, Young's asking price for the station being too high—purchased KNTV in San Jose from Granite Broadcasting Corporation for $230 million. Since the Hearst Corporation took ownership in 2000 the ''Chronicle'' has made periodic changes to its organization and design, but on February 1, 2009, as the newspaper began its 145th year of publication, the ''Chronicle'' Sunday edition introduced a redesigned paper featuring a modified logo, new section, and page organization, new features, bolder, colored section-front banners and new headline and text typography. The frequent bold-faced, all-capital-letter headlines typical of the ''Chronicle''s front page were eliminated. Editor Ward Bushee's note heralded the issue as the start of a "new era" for the ''Chronicle''. On July 6, 2009, the paper unveiled some alterations to the new design that included yet newer section fronts and wider use of color photographs and graphics. In a special section publisher, Frank J. Vega described new, state-of-the-art printing operations enabling the production of what he termed "A Bolder, Brighter ''Chronicle''." The newer look was accompanied by a reduction in size of the broadsheet. Such moves are similar to those made by other prominent American newspapers such as the ''
Chicago Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...
'' and '' Orlando Sentinel'', which in 2008 unveiled radically new designs even as changing reader demographics and general economic conditions necessitated physical reductions of the newspapers. On November 9, 2009, the ''Chronicle'' became the first newspaper in the nation to print on high-quality glossy paper. The high-gloss paper is used for some section fronts and inside pages.


Staff

The current publisher of the ''Chronicle'' is Bill Nagel.
Audrey Cooper Audrey Cooper (born 1977) is an American journalist. Hearst Corporation named her as Editor in Chief of the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' on January 13, 2015, making her the first woman to hold this position. Before Cooper's appointment, there w ...
was named editor-in-chief in January 2015 and was the first woman to hold the position. In June 2020 she left to be the editor-in-chief of WNYC, New York City. In August 2020, Hearst named Emilio Garcia-Ruiz the publication's editor in chief.
Ann Killion Ann Killion is an American sports journalist and author. She has written for ''Sports Illustrated, San Francisco Chronicle'', Comcast Sportsnet, ''San Jose Mercury News,'' and ''Los Angeles Times''. She is the co-author of two books with Olympic ...
has written for ''
Sports Illustrated ''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence tw ...
''.
Carl Nolte Carl Nolte (born c. 1933) is an American journalist. He writes the "Native Son" column in the ''San Francisco Chronicle''. Personal life and education Nolte was born and raised in San Francisco. When he was a child, he lived in the Potrero Hill n ...
is a journalist and columnist. Tom Stienstra is a columnist.


Web

The newspaper's websites are at SFGate.com (free) and SFChronicle.com (premium). Originally ''The Gate'', SFGATE was one of the earliest major market newspaper websites to be launched, on November 3, 1994, at the time of The Newspaper Guild strike; the union published its own news website, ''San Francisco Free Press'', whose staff joined SFGATE when the strike ended. SFChronicle.com launched in 2013 and since 2019 has been run separately from SFGATE, whose staff are independent of the print newspaper. across all platforms the Chronicle has 34 million unique visitors each month, with SFGATE receiving 135.9 million pageviews and 25.1 million unique visitors per month and SFChronicle.com 31.3 million pageviews and 31.3 million unique visitors per month globally.


Praise, criticism, and features

The paper has received the Pulitzer Prize on a number of occasions. Despite an illustrious and long history, the paper's news reportage is not as extensive as in the past. The current day ''Chronicle'' has followed the trend of other American newspapers, devoting increasing attention to local and regional news and cultural and entertainment criticism to the detriment of the paper's traditionally strong national and international reporting, though the paper does maintain a Washington, D.C., bureau. This increased focus on local news is a response to the competition from other Bay Area newspapers including the resurrected '' San Francisco Examiner'', the '' Oakland Tribune'', the ''East Bay Times'' (formerly ''Contra Costa Times'') and the '' Mercury News''. Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada received the 2004 George Polk Award for Sports Reporting. Fainaru-Wada and Williams were recognized for their work on uncovering the
BALCO The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) (1984–2003) was an American company led by founder and owner Victor Conte. In 2003, journalists Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada investigated the company's role in a drug sports scandal later re ...
scandal, which linked
San Francisco Giants The San Francisco Giants are an American professional baseball team based in San Francisco, California. The Giants compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. Founded in 1883 as the New Yo ...
star Barry Bonds to performance-enhancing drugs. While the two above-named reporters broke the news, they are by no means the only sports writers of note at the ''Chronicle''. The ''Chronicle''s sports section, edited by Al Saracevic and called ''Sporting Green'' as it is printed on green-tinted pages, is staffed by a dozen writers. The section's best-known writers are its columnists: Bruce Jenkins, Ann Killion, Scott Ostler, Saracevic and Tom Stienstra. Its baseball coverage is anchored by Henry Schulman, John Shea, and
Susan Slusser Susan Slusser is an American sportswriter who works for the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', covering the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball. She was the first woman to serve as president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. ...
, the first female president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). The ''Chronicle's'' Sunday arts and entertainment insert section is called ''Datebook'', and has for decades been printed on pink-tinted paper in a tabloid format. Movie reviews (for many years written by nationally known critic Mick LaSalle) feature a unique rating system: instead of stars or a "thumbs up" system, the ''Chronicle'' has for decades used a small cartoon icon, sitting in a movie theater seat, known as the "Little Man," explained in 2008 by the ''
Chicago Sun-Times The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the '' Chicago ...
'' film critic Roger Ebert: "...the only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', who is seen (1) jumping out of his seat and applauding wildly; (2) sitting up happily and applauding; (3) sitting attentively; (4) asleep in his seat; or (5) gone from his seat." Another area of note is the architecture column by John King; the ''Chronicle'' is still one of the few American papers to present a regular column on architectural issues. The paper also has regular weekly sections devoted to Food & Home and Style.


Challenges

Circulation has fallen sharply since the dot-com boom peaked from around 1997 to 2001. The ''Chronicle''s daily readership dropped by 16.6% between 2004 and 2005 to 400,906; The ''Chronicle'' fired one quarter of its newsroom staff in a cost-cutting move in May 2007. Newspaper executives pointed to growth of SFGate, the online website with 5.2 million unique visitors per month – fifth among U.S. newspaper websites in 2007. In February 2009, Hearst chief executive Frank A. Bennack Jr., and Hearst President Steven R. Swartz, announced that the ''Chronicle'' had lost money every year since 2001 and more than $50 million in 2008. Without major concessions from employees and other cuts, Hearst would put the papers up for sale and, if no buyer was found, shut the paper. San Francisco would have become the first major American city without a daily newspaper. The cuts were made. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the threats, the loss of readers and advertisers accelerated. On October 26, 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that the ''Chronicle'' had suffered a 25.8% drop in circulation for the six-month period ending September 2009, to 251,782 subscribers, the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper in the United States. ''Chronicle'' publisher Frank Vega said the drop was expected as the paper moved to earn more from higher subscription fees from fewer readers. In May 2013, Vega retired and was replaced as publisher by former ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...
'' publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson. SFGate, the main digital portal for the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', registered 19 million unique visitors in January 2015, making it the seventh-ranked newspaper website in the United States.


Publishers

*
M. H. de Young Michael Henry de Young (September 30, 1849 – February 15, 1925) was an American journalist and businessman. Early life De Young was born in St. Louis, Missouri. The family was Jewish. Michael in later years claimed that his father was a Balt ...
, 1865–1925 * George T. Cameron, 1925–1955 * Charles de Young Thieriot, 1955–1977 * Richard Tobin Thieriot, 1977–1993 * John Sias, 1993–1999. (First publisher not to be a member of the de Young/Cameron/Thieriot family) * John Oppedahl, 2000-2003 * Steven Falk, 2003–2004 * Frank Vega, 2004–2013 * Jeffrey M. Johnson, 2013–2018 * Bill Nagel, 2018–present


See also

*''
San Francisco Chronicle Magazine The ''San Francisco Chronicle Magazine'' is a Sunday magazine published on the first Sunday of every month as an insert in the ''San Francisco Chronicle''. The current magazine is the successor of ''The San Francisco Examiner Magazine''; the staf ...
'' * Chronicle Publishing Company * Chronicle Books * Chronicle Features *
KRON-TV KRON-TV (channel 4) is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, KRON-TV maintains studios on Front Street in the c ...


References


External links

*
SFGate: Online version of the newspaper
contains freely searchable archive of all articles since 1995

, contains instructions on searching archived papers 1865–1922

{{Authority control 1865 establishments in California De Young family George Polk Award recipients Hearst Communications publications Daily newspapers published in the San Francisco Bay Area Publications established in 1865 South of Market, San Francisco Weeks and Day buildings Newspapers published in San Francisco