ChronicleWatch Watch

For those of you who have better things to do than hate on a perfectly-pleasant locally-focused column that tries to do nothing more than bring a little good and a little sunshine into all our dreary lives, ChronicleWatch asks Chronicle readers to send in reports of things that are broken, confusing, or just plain gross in their local neighborhoods and the Chron will call local officials and get it taken care of. So the water got turned back on for that weird fountain by Embarcadero Four, highway signs get put back up after being knocked down, potholes are fixed, and swimming pools are de-loused (okay, we made that last one up).

Now, SFist is all about quality of life improvements, sure, and there's no denying that getting the drippy fire hydrant tightened and fences repaired is a real service. But why don't we have a 311 system here, then? And come on, maybe this is just too obvious, but it would be less maddening to read the articles about knocked-over bird feeders or broken stairs if the Chron maybe also could maybe just once in awhile run a real article about you know, large-scale problems in San Francisco? Like why the murder rate is going up and why the police and the DA can't work together to catch and convict? Or how Care Not Cash is doing? Or how we're going to keep a vibrant left-wing community strong in light of lower job numbers and upwardly-spiraling rents? Just to name a few. Nope, it's going to be all about "this poor official we called at BART is going to have his face on the front page of the Bay Area section for the next week while we demand to know why one of the Platform 2 signs has a burned out lightbulb in the LED display." It's not necessarily that dude's fault! Maybe it's because BART ridership is down and no one will support a rate hike or cuts in service, so BART can't get the funding to replace the entire sign until the next budget cycle -- ya think?

Also, SFist is convinced that, like Ask Marilyn, the ChronicleWatch only picks and chooses things they know they can get fixed. (Ask Marilyn has got to only be picking "puzzles from readers" that she knows the answers to -- puh-leeze). You don't see ChronicleWatch tackling, say, the city's rat problem.

And it's always entertaining to see how long ChronicleWatch'll hedge their bets that they can humiliate some minor functionary into dropping everything else they're working on just to get off the list. They have that little countdown clock, "Days on the Watch List," and the item will run for like 5 days, 7 days, 10 days, and then suddenly it gets yanked. You can see the folks at the Chron going, "well, dang, they're never going to clip back the bougainvillea on that fence, are they?" SFist also has a grudging respect for those officials who periodically pop up on the "update" sections, with the big "On the Watch List: 475 Days." You can sort of see those folks thinking, "ehhhhh - haven't lost my job yet -- screw it!"

Oh, ChronicleWatch -- you're the column we love to hate! Happy 2nd birthday and keep up the good work.