Just two years after Gavin Newsom brokered a $250 million deal with Google and Meta for them to help preserve the local newspapers that their business models have destroyed, Newsom himself is now dismantling the deal.  

Back in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a deal that persuaded Google and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $250 million over five years to help save local California newspapers, a medium whose advertising had been completely siphoned off by Google, Facebook, and Instagram, among other companies. At the time, Newsom declared, “This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California — leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians.”

Fast forward a year and a half later, and Newsom has quietly killed the deal. Newsom just introduced his proposed $400 billion budget for 2025-27, and Bay Area News Group reports that Newsom has eliminated the newspaper subsidy in that budget.  

Moreover, Newsom’s office has not commented on why, or given any explanation for doing this. But other parties have plenty of comment about the program being eliminated.

“It seems shockingly short-sighted when it comes to supporting local journalism which by now we know has no commercial future,” University of Pennsylvania professor of media policy Victor Pickard told the News Group. “I understand there may be budget shortfalls and there are always thoughtful decisions that need to be made about funding … but local journalism should be a higher priority.”

The state of California was paying into the fund, as were tech companies like Google and Meta. California contributed $10 million in 2025, which was matched by Google, though Meta’s contribution is not mentioned. This year, Google will make like Gavin Newsom, and not contribute to the program.

And the company put out a pretty cheeky statement about how they don't have to pay the $10 million per year now that the state's not paying their share, either.

“We stand ready to match the state’s contribution to the Civic Media Program and are awaiting the final budget later this year,” a Google spokesperson told the News Group.

Related: Meta Wins Antitrust Battle, Does Not Have to Spin Off Instagram or WhatsApp [SFist]

Image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 03: California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during the 2025 New York Times Dealbook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 03, 2025 in New York City. NYT columnist Sorkin hosted the annual Dealbook summit which brings together business and government leaders to discuss the most important stories across business, politics and culture. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

A group of seasoned Bay Area journalists has launched Coyote Media Collective, a worker-owned newsroom inspired by alt-weeklies, aiming to revive independent local reporting with deep stories, sharp opinions, and creative multimedia across the region.

Founded this year by 11 veteran reporters, podcasters, photographers, and editors, the collective includes contributors to national publications such as The Guardian, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, NPR, Pitchfork, and ProPublica, "as well as pretty much every local publication in the Bay Area:" Amir Aziz, Nuala Bishari, Alan Chazaro, Reo Eveleth, Estefany Gonzalez, Rahawa Haile, Soleil Ho, Daniel Lavery, Cecilia Lei, Emma Silvers and Supriya Yelimeli.

As KQED reports, the group was formed out of frustration with the limitations of corporate media with the goal of prioritizing editorial freedom and local relevance.

The project quickly gained public support after it was announced in early June — raising over 75% of its $80,000 launch goal within two days and now targeting $150,000 to support fair pay and consistent output. All content will be free to read, with optional memberships offering perks and expanded access.

Coyote’s coverage will span the Bay Area, focusing on investigative reporting, arts and culture, experimental formats, and pointed commentary. Planned features include a Craigslist-style “Meet Cute Market” and a Bay Area events calendar. The name references the trickster of Pomo mythology, the adaptable local animal, and COYOTE, the 1970s sex workers’ rights group.

The launch comes amid a national shift toward worker-owned media as an alternative to ad-driven, billionaire-backed, or algorithm-focused newsrooms. Drawing inspiration from the alt-weekly tradition, Coyote’s founders aim to bring a mix of rigor and irreverence to local journalism. The site is expected to launch later this summer.

Image: Coyote Media Collective on Facebook

SF’s waning foot traffic amid the COVID-19 crisis recently forced the San Francisco Media Company to stop producing print for SF Weekly and SF Evergreen, in lieu of adequate advertisement revenue.

Long before the current pandemic, physical papers were struggling en masse. The Mountain Messenger, California's oldest weekly newspaper — the same print publication that Mark Twain himself once contributed to with some regularity — announced their folding in December, due to struggles with cash flow; they couldn’t secure enough income from advertisers to balance their expenses. Now, both SF Weekly and the SF Evergreen find themselves in similar situations after it was announced yesterday their parent company, San Francisco Media Co., would stop producing each paper's print issues, as well as furlough staffers and cut the working hours of employed journalists in order to offset profit losses spurred by the ballooning coronavirus calamity.

“Due to the deep declines in advertising and because fewer people are in The City every day to pick up the print version of our publications, we have temporarily stopped producing SF Weekly and SF Evergreen in print,” writes Deborah Petersen, editor-in-chief of the SF-based media business, in yesterday’s announcement. Prior, in the published call for help, Petersen lamented that she had to do “the horrible task” of slashing the hours of working journalists who lend voices to those publications, leaving some staffers furloughed and others with drastic reductions in pay.

“Our mission at the San Francisco Media Co. has always been to provide local news online and in print that is unencumbered by paywalls and subscription fees,” she adds before foreshadowing the company’s current financial struggles. “Doing that requires the support of our advertisers, and [the readership].”

Absent of a bustling, outwardly vivacious San Francisco filled with eager readers gamboling down city sidewalks, SF Media Company’s well of local advertisers to glean from has all but dried up. However, supporters of the media company-owned publications can rally together and individually join the SF Examiner’s membership program, which will help offer some monetary comfort.

(Currently, the SF Weekly doesn't have such a program in place.)

“The membership program at the Examiner is a way for community members to show that they support free journalism that is unlike any other coverage in The City,” Petersen notes. “In return, we provide members with benefits for joining[, we] know that this crisis is impacting many people. And, if you are one of the people who is hurting financially, and cannot join our program now, make a note to yourself to do so someday.”

The SF Examiner’s membership program has four available tiers— “Working Headliner,” “Above The Fold,” “Page Turner,” and “Stop The Presses!” — ranging in cost from as little as $40 per year to all the way up to $1K for yearly "ownership." Every tier has specific goodies and, as you ascend the faction ladder, they get progressively better. Nevertheless, you’ll get a sublime sticker designed by the company’s art director and “members only” updates from the Examiner’s newsroom no matter which option you purchase.

But back to The Mountain Messenger: Carl Butz, a 71-year-old retiree and avid reader of the once soon-to-be-defunct paper, swooped in at the last minute in early January... and saved the publication from going the way of the dodo. Let that serve as an iota of hope that, with community support, we can help bolster our beloved SF papers through this pandemic.

You can sign up for the SF Examiner's membership program, here.

Related: East Bay Newspaper Founded in 1858 Rolls Out Its Final Print Edition Sunday

Street Sheet Turns 30 as the Underdog Paper Refuses to Fold

*An earlier version of this post suggested that the Examiner was stopping print publication as well, but it is only SF Weekly and SF Evergreen.

A toast to David Perlman: A journalist and colleague extraordinaire retires https://t.co/Rd6eMTZCxe via @sfchronicle pic.twitter.com/UulmEzWBo9

— joegarofoli (@joegarofoli) August 3, 2017

77 years after joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a copy boy, science reporter David Perlman is retiring.

The Chron's John King penned a loving tribute to his colleague which you should read, mainly because anyone who works in journalism for 77 years makes for a good story themselves. But because you're in a rush to cut out of work early, here're the best parts:

• Born in Baltimore, Perlman grew up in Manhattan, went to Columbia's school of journalism, and came to San Francisco to work as a "copy boy" for the Chron in 1940.
• Right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Perlman was sent to the Chron's roof to look for incoming enemy aircraft. He left in the paper 1942 to join the Army and returned in 1951.
• He was married to his wife Anne for 61 years and they have three children. She died in 2002.
• A photo of a young Perlman petting a bird in 1955 reveals that the nearly 100-year-old writer was a stone cold fox.
• Laid-up from a 1957 ski accident, a friend gave Perlman a book called The Nature of the Universe. This book triggered Perlman's passion for science, which he parlayed into a job as a science writer.
• He's covered everything from the early AIDS epidemic to evolution and reported from such spots as the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica. (A commenter on King's tribute complained that Perlman didn't write about AIDS early enough. Make of that what you will.)
• Awards are named after him.
• Perlman covered any topic he was assigned, not just science. For example, he attended a press conference for a Grace Kelly film and admired the actress' low key gin consumption.
• He is at hug-level with DiFi.
• The LA Times did a piece on him four years ago, which marveled that Perlman was still at work. They also said that he's shrunk.
• On aging, Perlman was overhead to say, "Doctors want to put their hands all over me ... I guess it beats being embalmed."
• Perlman's last regular piece for the Chronicle is about the upcoming eclipse and will run this Sunday.

It's unclear who, if anyone, will be tasked with filling Perlman's (science) shoes. And if you want to read more about him, check out this profile from 2013 that ran in the LA Times.

Related: Veteran Fist-Shaking Chronicle Columnist CW Nevius Announces He's Leaving The Paper After 36 Years

SF Chronicle recipe for Avocado Toast, April 8, 1927 https://t.co/UMnH7YCnLM pic.twitter.com/AZ4NI2MZky

— Eric Fischer (@enf) July 20, 2017

Though avocado toast — the complicated culinary concoction in which mashed avocado is placed atop a piece of heated bread — is used as shorthand for everything that's wrong with the 2010s* boom time bubble, a Bay Area history buff reminds us that 90 years ago, the local paper of record was recommending it as a dish.

We can thank San Francisco Exploratorium programmer and visualization artist Eric Fischer for the Throwback Thursday memorandum. Fischer, a lauded social mapper and one of the only human beings on Twitter still worth following (it's basically just him and Officer Edith these days), is no stranger to archived print products, but his interests typically skew toward the urban-planny.

It appears, however, that he was driven into food tweeting by a Bon Appétit article entitled "Why Are We Still Talking About Avocado Toast?" In the piece, reporter John Birdsall traces present-day avocado toast's roots — again, let's be clear, we are talking about the process of smashing some avocado onto toasted bread, not the cure for smallpox — to Australia.

"There’s little doubt that modern avo toast—the Instagram kind—can trace its existence to that continent," Birdsall writes, as

In 1993 Sydney chef and restaurateur Bill Granger put a sexed-up version of avocado toast—with lime, salt, and chile flakes (the modern foundational recipe)—on the menu at Bills in Darlinghurst, near Sydney. In the new millennium, it jumped to New York City via Chloe Osborne, another Aussie, who became the consulting chef of Cafe Gitane in Greenwich Village. Her version was similarly Australian: a pebble-grained slice from a square loaf, toasted and covered in mashed avocado, diamond-cut and confetti-covered with crushed chile.

But, as Birdsall ably notes, avocado toast was actually consumed by SoCal residents sixty years before Australians started stealing all our acting jobs and starting present-day food trends.

A 1931 column in the Los Angeles Times announced that in the coffee shop of the swank Clark Hotel downtown, ladies “tired out from shopping” could refresh themselves with one of the “delightful luncheons,” only 50 cents. These included avocado on toast and “delicious coffee, iced or hot.”

But even in 1931, avocado toast wasn’t new. In 1920, in the Covina Argus, a newspaper from a town in the San Gabriel Valley, a writer named Martin Fesler gave his recipe for Avocado on Toast: “Remove the skin and mash with a fork. Spread thickly on a small square of hot toast. Add a little salt and pepper.” He called it one of the nicest ways of serving avocado.

By the time Genevieve A. Callahan wrote the Sunset All-Western Cook Book in 1933, avocado toast was worth describing in her section on avocados (she strains and seasons the pulp), though it didn’t warrant a formal recipe. The dish was just something you needed to know as a Southern Californian to deal with the excess fruit from your yard or with the bags the neighbor lugged over from hers.

Here's that Argus recipe, if you need even more instruction on how to add items to a slice of bread:

And here's another one, reportedly from 1885!

That last one makes the Chron recipe fairly old news even by 1927, eh? So you've gotta wonder, will Fischer's much-retweeted reminder that avocado toast is nothing new somehow make people think twice about using "avocado toast" as a representative of all that is wrong with the present-day boom of Instagrammable coastal prosperity? Probably not, as the turn of that century had their own version of glossy but shallow prosperity: See The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel about a mansion-dwelling millionaire whose fortune was a sham and who dies in the end. Yes, the same book that has recently inspired numerous tech company parties. What is it they say about people who don't remember the past?

*What are we calling the 2010s, anyway? I asked Jay, and he said "the 2010s, I guess." Is there a clever name for the period between 2010-2020 yet? In other news, I have a credit card that expires on 4/20 and that always makes me laugh. TGIF guys!

Related: The Irony!: Three Big Tech Companies All Had Great Gatsby-Themed Holiday Parties This Year

Two weeks after a longstanding San Francisco Chronicle columnist retired to great fanfare, an interview reveals that the beloved writer might have been forced into dropping the pen.

As previously noted, SF Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll filed his last column for the paper on November 19, 33 years after he joined the publication. As befits a departing legend, the newspaper published a multitude of tributes and threw the 72-year-old a newsroom shindig. But in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review from Wednesday, Carroll suggested that he was pushed out of the city's paper of record.

When asked "Why did you decide to retire?" Carroll responded "It’s a complicated question. Let me put it this way, it was not entirely voluntary, but I was offered a choice and I took it."

It's possible that Carroll's absence from a newsroom desk played a part in his departure, as he says that "I’m very much in favor of writing at home. That was one of the issues with the Chronicle and me. For 25 years I’d write at home, and the idea that it would be useful for me to write somewhere else is nonsense."

"When I was at a newsroom, being out of the office was considered to be a good thing, absorbing whatever it is you were supposed to be absorbing."

"Let’s put it this way," Carroll said, "All of the features of corporate bureaucracy have come to dominate the newspaper business, which used to work on a slightly more informal basis. It wasn’t like a factory."

But if you feel bad for Carroll after his possible shove out the 901 Mission door, don't.

"I have to say," Carroll says, "that now that it’s happened, I couldn’t be happier."

Previously: 'Dear Abby' Easter Egg For Retiring Chron Columnist

Getting a physical copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from a street vendor, already something of a nostalgic callback, is becoming a thing of the past.

KPIX reports that the Chronicle will no longer pay street vendors to sell their publication, citing the minimum wage as the root cause in their headline. But that's unsubstantiated in the piece, and the Chronicle hasn't yet given them comment, so hold your judgment there. After all, there are a lot of possible reasons why this could be happening, instead of or in addition to changes made to the minimum wage.

Further, the channel reports that vendors are to disappear completely. And yes, the departure of people one so often sees downtown will certainly spark alot of sad "sign of the times" talk. But not all papers are giving up on news vendors all at once, so that may be hyperbolic.

Still, at least one vendor is definitely disappearing. James Miller, a contractor, said goodbye to the business on Friday, parting with his post selling the Chron near Montgomery Street BART.

"It’s changed over the last couple of years,” said Miller. “They’re trying to go online and home deliveries, which probably explains why they’re trying to get rid of us so they can get more profit out of home deliveries and online.”

Physical copies of the Chronicle will be available in corner machines and at stores, of course. You just can't get it the real old fashioned way like your grandparents used to.

And yet, you seem to have found your way to a blog on the Internet. You'll probably be fine.

Related: Arrest Made In Attack On Elderly Montgomery Station Newspaper Vendor

In a move that should only make what goes on behind the scenes at San Francisco Media Company even more entertaining, the Examiner hired controversial sports pundit Jay Mariotti.

On Friday the paper announced that Mariotti would be hired "as sports director and columnist." Although he spent 16 years at the Chicago Sun-Times, he was known to a national audience via ESPN's show Around The Horn where participants were brought on to spout nonsense and get into shouting matches—a role fitting of Mariotti.

Mariotti's firebrand demeanor made him disliked by colleagues and the sports figures he covered. Former Chicago White Sox manager called Mariotti a gay slur, only to later apologize for the word he used but not for insulting Mariotti, adding, "I'm not going to back off of Jay." When Mariotti left the Sun-Times in 2008 to write for AOL, proclaiming that the print industry was dead, his former colleague and usually amicable Roger Ebert wrote a scathing column addressed to Mariotti titled "Jay The Rat." Sports columnist and radio host Dan LeBatard called Mariotti, in a Big Lead column that somewhat defended him, a "cartoon caricature" of sports pundits and said he was "loud, judgmental and wagging a parental, castigating and for-profit finger at the behavior of all those beneath him."

A 2010 domestic abuse incident and accusations of stalking his ex-girlfriend made Mariotti disappear from the sports media grid, leading him to lose his ESPN gig and getting suspended from AOL. He later plead "no contest" and used the opportunity to promote an e-book. His lawyer told the L.A. Times, "The fact that he is an accomplished writer provided him another avenue, in this case a book, to tell his side in an unconventional but progressive manner." Woof.

Regarding his legal issues, he told the Chronicle, "If people take the time to investigate the finality of this case, they will understand what truly happened and not judge me from false, reckless allegations from four years ago."

"A lot of this so-called reputation I have is smear crap from Chicago."

Since then, he's lived a quiet(er) life in Los Angeles and worked for Sports Talk Florida, but will be making the move north to make his Examiner debut in March. He briefly popped his head back up almost a year ago when he wrote The Ultimate Sports Take: a whole column telling President Obama to stick to the Real Issues instead of wasting his time with his NCAA bracket while also blaming himself for getting Obama elected. And to top it all off, he closed with the friendly reminder, "And, yes, the Malaysia Airlines jetliner is still missing."

As for the irony of joining an industry that he slammed the first time left it, how now thinks it's the future. "I am thrilled to develop premier content in a city overflowing with powerful sports stories while designing and planning a 21st-century presentation," he said in the Examiner's announcement.

Mariotti joins the San Francisco Media Company, which owns both the Examiner and SF Weekly, who is not-so-secretly shuffling its deck behind the scenes. They fired SF Weekly editor Brandon Reynolds in January and are now also dealing with the departure of food editor Anna Roth on Friday. Sources tell Eater that the Weekly had become an "increasingly toxic environment." In October, the SFMC shuttered the Bay Guardian after 48 years of publication.

Matt Werner, author and tech writer at Google, has had unbridled success with the advent of Oakland Unseen, a popular parody Tumblr billed as Oakland's answer to The Onion. Last Friday, Werner released the first-ever print edition of Oakland Unseen. On the dawn of his publication's physical manifestation (don't worry, fans, his work can and will still be found online!), SFist asked Werner five questions about his leap to print. And more.

1. Why did you decide to go to print?

Matt Werner: I decided to go to print because just over a month ago, the story Jack White Flight: Hipsters Fleeing Oakland in Record Numbers went viral. It got over 25,000 hits in under a week, which is a lot for a fake news site about Oakland (which has a population of 400,000).

I saw that the audience for these satirical pieces about life in the East Bay wasn't restricted to local journalists and those blogging about city politics, but that mainstream readers were also interested in these fake news stories.

And why I decided to do print in addition to the online version is because working with the print medium, you're able to do things that you can't online. For example, I'm proud of pages 2 and 3 that Greg Frazier did the layout for. We were about to fill a map of Oakland and a map of the Bay Area with news briefs, and cram in a ton of stories on the 12"x22" paper (24"x22" across the spread) that we couldn't as easily do online. Also, a number of the pieces play off each other, and having a print version, we're able to group the top stories around Local Politics, Sports, Oakland Tourism, and create separate sections for each.

2. How do you come up with your story ideas?

There's no real science to it. I try to write for 2-3 hours 5 days a week. I'm not writing exclusively for Oakland Unseen, but just whatever I'm interested in writing about outside of work. I covered a number of local news stories for Oakland Local over the last couple years, and I've written two books on Oakland and the Bay Area in the past two years. But my last project (Bay Area Underground) and my next project (a play set around September 11th in San Francisco) are very serious projects, and I wanted to do something lighter in between.

Oakland Unseen is a collection of the "unseen" or unheard stories in Oakland. I like The Onion's pieces, but many of them seem to have an East Coast or Midwest bias. So I thought up last October before the 2012 elections, what if The Onion had an Oakland bureau? What would that look like? And I started posting satirical news articles to OaklandUnseen.tumblr.com.

As for the writing process, I come up with most ideas based on observations about life in Oakland, and some people email their ideas into oaklandunseen@gmail.com. I have a small committee that vets the ideas and pieces before they go out so that they're not mean-spirited, but that they're shedding light on an issue in Oakland in a funny or creative way.

So, for example, I haven't been to Burning Man, but I know enough people who've gone from the Bay Area and heard their stories about Burning Man, that I wrote a few fictional pieces about the event. I ran them by my Burner friends before publishing to get their feedback — saying that I don't want to insult the Burner community, but kind of poke fun at the absurdity of the event (from an outsider's perspective) and the stereotypes associated with the event. I incorporated their constructive feedback, and ran pieces like "With Burners Gone, Oakland Residents Have One of the Most Productive Weeks in Recent Memory."

We don't want to laugh at people, but to laugh with them. There's a lot of absurdity in Oakland and the greater Bay Area, that sometimes people reply on Twitter asking if a story is actually true. When I ran "Powerful Vegan Lobby Leads Crusade Against SFO Being Renamed Milk Airport," people replied asking who runs this vegan lobby, and how is it so powerful? And why are they against SFO being renamed after Harvey Milk? I've clearly marked that this is all fake news.

If I have any hesitation with an article, I'll sit on it and run it by a number of people to get their reactions and responses before running or pulling the piece.

3. Who, in print/online, are your comedic inspirations/influences?

This is my first real attempt at comedic writing outside of my first book Papers for the Suppression of Reality, which could be termed "postmodern" or "academic humor."

I interned and volunteered at McSweeney's Publishing for 5 years in the Mission District, so McSweeney's has had a big influence over my writing style. As for Oakland Unseen in particular, The Onion, Daily Show, and Colbert Report — specifically Stephen Colbert's 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner Address are the closest direct influences.

Other publications that I draw inspiration from are the online sites: Scoopertino, The Pan-Arabia Enquirer, and Kickstriker, and the classic print publications Army Man and Might Magazine.

4. Do you plan an Unseen for San Francisco? Or better yet, Orinda?

I don't currently plan an Unseen edition for San Francisco, although I have plenty of ideas — or better yet — Marin County is just a rife target for satire. Dana Carvey has a brilliant standup routine about Prius-driving Marin parents, and there is plenty of material to do a similar publication on San Francisco or Marin, but right now I don't think I'm the right person to do it because what I know best is Oakland and Berkeley.

And because so much of the media in the Bay Area is focused on San Francisco, I purposely left much of my SF fake news coverage out of the print version of Oakland Unseen, to show that there's also a lot happening on the East Bay, and that if there's this much fake news about the East Bay — there are plenty more real news stories on the East Bay that aren't currently being covered by the mainstream media. I'm just scratching the surface.

5. Anything else you want to tell our readers?

Oakland Unseen is an attempt to show the lighter side of life in Oakland. So much media coverage about Oakland just focuses on the violence and robberies in the city. I'm not denying that Oakland has a high crime rate, but crime isn't the only story about Oakland. In my piece "SF Chronicle Criticized for Publishing Too Much Positive Press about Oakland," and throughout the paper, I offer alternate story lines about Oakland.

Also, I was the editor of the project, and Joe Sciarrillo is the publisher under Thought Publishing, Susie Cagle drew seven drawings in the paper, including the hipster drawing on the front page and the 4 fake "Visit Oakland" tourist t-shirts. Greg Frazier did the design and layout. We also had anonymous submissions from Oakland residents.

-----

The stubborn world of print media took way too long to avail themselves of the digital universe, and here in mid-2013 we are still seeing the fallout. A new audit this week by the Alliance for Audited Media shows us that while big international news orgs like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are boasting healthy circulations in print and online forms, local newspapers are seeing rapidly dwindling audiences and revenues. And magazines aren't doing so well either.

It's telling that the top two slots in the ranking of magazine circulations are occupied by AARP's two magazine titles, and both by a lot. The two have circulations of 22 million readers, while next in line in-print circulation are two other titles the elderlies love: Better Homes & Gardens, and Reader's Digest at 7.6 million and 5.2 million respectively. Magazine sales, as in newsstand sales, are pretty crappy too; they fell 10% in the first half of this year.

Magazines did manage to double their digital subscription base this year, likely via the popularity of tablets.

Newspaper circulation numbers, meanwhile, have seen a steady decline since the 1980s. As the Journal's Jason Bellini reports, about 63 million daily papers were being bought back in 1985, and that number is now about 45 million. And while people are willing to spend money for digital subscriptions to newspapers that cover a range of stories of national interest, like the NYT, other papers like the Washington Post and [cough] the San Francisco Chronicle aren't seeing the same success in luring paid online subscribers. The Chronicle, in fact, just slipped off the ranking of the top 25 circulated papers in the country for the first time in decades this year, with a total combined digital/print circulation of 219,000 as of March. (The figure for digital circulation post-paywall is not available at this time.)

The NYT boasts a circulation of 1.2 million daily readers now, and the WSJ has double that, at 2.4 million, with a bigger percentage of print readers.

The value of locally focused newspapers continues to slip as these numbers decline. Just this week, as you likely heard, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a cool $250 million after posting a 14 percent earnings loss, and the New York Times Company sold off the Boston Globe at a significant loss 20 years after they bought it — the purchase price in 1993 was $1.1 billion, and not adjusting for inflation they still took a bath selling it at $70 million.

What does it all mean? It means that local papers had better quickly catch up in terms of online ad revenue and digital subscriptions if they're going to survive, but it remains to be seen how many digital subscriptions the average newshound is willing to pay for when there's a whole free internet there to inform them.

Watch Bellini's full report below.

[Wall Street Journal]
[AdAge]
[SF Gate]
[Alliance for Audited Media]

Local print newspaper powerhouse Todd Vogt has thrown some shade at recently-burglarized Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi via Twitter. Vogt — owner of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Bay Guardian — unleashed a slew of pointed tweets to his whopping 40 followers (ha, burn) aimed at the former Speaker of the House and her arguably lackluster job representing the 8th District. "[Pelosi] has been a dismal representative for the 8th District," Vogt told the SF Appeal. "She was a totally ineffective Speaker and couldn't control her caucus."

Here are a couple of his angry tweets, which went live in November:

It's November 19, 2012 and Nancy Pelosi still hasn't resigned.This is Day 1.

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) November 19, 2012

Elected office isn't something that is owned or something thatcan be passed from one generation to another or mother to daughter.

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) November 27, 2012

Since The Appeal's story broke this morning on the newspaper magnate's ire for Pelosi, he's been tongue-and-cheekily tweeting about Pelosi, among other things. Behold:

Fiscal cliff standoff? Stalemate? Who cares!! Without real change and new leadership we're no better off. And Nancy Pelosi didn't resign yet

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) December 3, 2012

Did I mention I want Nancy Pelosi to resign? And for people to call for the resignation of all ineffective, self-interested politicians?

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) December 3, 2012

As of 11:55am all inbound/eastbound BART trains sitting stationary for last 5 mins. What's going on?And Nancy Pelosi won't resign.

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) December 3, 2012

BART moving again - Hooray!Nancy Pelosi hasn't resigned - Boooooo!

— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) December 3, 2012

What is a newspaper tycoon such as Vogt doing taking BART, you ask? No idea. Crazy world.

Vogt became President of the the SF Examiner after the infamously conservative and backwards Anschutz's Clarity Media Group sold the Examiner back in November 2011 to a group that included Vogt and the CEO of Canadian newspaper company Black Press. Vogt also bought The SF Bay Guardian in April in 2012. (Pst, unconfirmed rumor has it that Vogt might buy East Bay Express So there's that bit of gossip, too.)

He does seem like a nice guy too, even if he is in the print-publishing world. Vogt gets to work with the fine folks at the The Bay Guardian, must to put up with SF Examiner EIC Stephen Buel, and for some curious reason, chooses to ride public transportation. Let's just hope he selects soon an avatar to replace the dreaded Twitter egg.

[SFA]

"Literal Sign of the Times" by Ariel Dovas.

The Examiner, as we mentioned, was recently sold to a news consortium led by Black Press Group, and taking over as publisher is San Francisco resident Todd Vogt. Today the paper announced that it will be doing away with its right-wing editorial pages, and will be taking on a more strongly local focus.

Then Vogt takes a second to shit-talk the Chronicle, just because he can. "San Francisco is a vibrant and thought-leading city,” says Vogt. “While the other newspaper in The City [sic] says it is local, it long ago stopped reporting on issues that truly matter to this dynamic community. Its lackluster approach to local news only highlights the bold approach The SF Examiner takes in selecting and presenting stories that speak to San Franciscans."

Meanwhile, Examiner scribe Mike Aldax, he of our favorite crime reporting with his liberal use of words like "goon" and "thug," hails the changes to the editorial section, which goes down to two pages in today's paper, and takes on a more local focus. "There were 4 pages of opinions, mostly anti everything liberal, and much of it angered our readership," Aldax writes on Facebook. "What was most concerning was how boring they were to read. I don't care what side of the fence you fall on.... Pretty much none of it was written by folks in our newsroom, certainly not by our reporters, mostly folks from Washington D.C. or Denver. Hopefully San Franciscans will appreciate this new step and recognize that our staffers only want to report compelling local news."

[Examiner]

We've already got a smattering of love by way of regional editions of the NYT and Wall Street Journal, and now the Huffington Post is launching a San Francisco edition, as we first heard about in 2008 but the plans got revived back in April. The "internet newspaper" started by the marvelous Ariana Huffington and acquired by AOL just announced on Twitter that the S.F. launch is about two weeks off, so somewhere around July 10th.

As SF Citizen suggests, you can take a look at their Chicago edition to get an idea of what it will look like -- including a section about restaurants, and one devoted to breaking-news-related photos and video.

Looks like the haggard old Chronicle will be getting yet another run for its money, but the competition is obviously well deserved -- we still contend that SF Gate has been stuck in 1999 since, like, 1999.

"The Future of Newspapers" by Justin Beck.