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Warren Hellman, chairman of local private equity investment firm Hellman & Friedman, amateur banjo player and major sponsor of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, has come up with some crackpot scheme to turn the San Francisco Chronicle into a non-profit pit into which Hearst Corp. would continue to dump its money without seeing any return--sort of like a motorboat, or a fixer-upper, or a child who never amounts to anything.
According to the San Francisco Business Times, Hellman and other "prominent San Francisco Business Leaders" met to discuss leading such a conversion. As the BizTimes also reports, "Details remain sketchy. It’s unclear if the proposal is being seriously considered."
So, we'll just chalk this up to Hellman liking old timey things like banjo music and newsprint ink on his fingers while he eats his Cream of Wheat, and move on with our lives assuming print is dead and that Hearst execs are going to have a good laugh about this before selling the paper up the river.
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uh, the chron has been a "non-profit" for quite a number of years now...
Oh man. At first I thought the headline said "chocolate" instead of "Chronicle."
It's hard to imagine a situation in which the Chron would serve any charitable function. Chocolate, though, I could see.
I had forgotten the Chronicle existed until I saw this stuff about selling it on T.V.
Between the 'Boob Tube' and the internet I haven't picked up a paper for news in years.
Seeing as I don't have a bird who's cage I would need to line or a fireplace where it would be good to get the logs burning.... I have no use for a newspaper these day, profit or non-profit.
Except that the Chronicle (and other papers) provide the bulk of the nation's real reporting, which is then flowed onto the Internet and appears fresh every morning in your news feed.
SFGate publishes stories, and your Google News is full of headlines, because those organizations have a newsroom full of newspaper journalists. I don't defend the Chronicle's quality of reporting--which is pretty bad compared to, say the LA or NY Times--but their survival is paramount to SF citizenry getting creditable local coverage, unless some other outlet steps up to the plate real soon.
Do you really want to rely on IndyBay for your news? Beyond the Chron? The Examiner? I think turning the Chron to a nonprofit is kind of a crackpot idea, but the alternative--being the first major metropolitan area with no paper--is pretty scary.
we'll always have sfist amirite
Unfortunately, SFist puts its vast investigative journalism resources to wars between douchey blogger 1 and douchey blogger 2. I love SFist, but it's still an operation that provides links to the sources that do the real work..
Considering the outfit that man is wearing, I suspect he also wants to see the printing presses run by wisecracking dinosaurs.