Hey, you. Yes, you. Sitting there glazed-over and glassy-eyed from staring at your preferred choice of online viewing. Listen up: did you know that changes are afoot in the world of local print publishing? It's true. And this time the news involves neither embarrassing attempts to regain ad revenue nor pathetic blanket statements about the future of media from brain-dead journalists. It's good news. Shocking, but true. Here we go:
Glossy Mag News: 7x7 Gets Its Spine Back, SF Mag Scores New EIC
SF Mag Picks Bay Area's Best Sandwiches
Nabbing the coveted cover story slot, food treasure Jan Newberry of San Francisco Magazine developed a near-definitive guide to the best sandwiches in the Bay Area. Her "opinionated" guide proves that nothing beats a good sandwich. A few of her favorites? The cubano at Ironside, the fried-rockfish sandwich at The Alembic, the sardine and seared squid sandwich at Barbacco (which, agreed, is all kinds of savory splendor to behold), the BBQ pork banh mi at Cam Huong Cafe, and the warm egg-salad sandwich at Daniel Patterson's Ferry Building outpost, just to name a few. (Read the entire rundown here.) Alas, Newberry fails to tip her hat to the Christ-like phenomenon known as HRD's Mongolian beef cheesesteak sandwich. We can only hope she'll allow us to buy her one so that she may add it to her impressive roster.
Afternoon Palate Cleanser: San Francisco Magazine's Best of the Bay Party
Our favorite society photog, Drew Altizer, has dipped his toes in iIl linguaggio del cinema (which, for those of you not in the know, è universale), and his latest effort is this surf punk-infused montage of 's Best of the Bay Party.
The Offies 2007 Tickle, Delight
If you have a free second - provided you have finished reading each SFist story and clicking on every one of our advertisers, of course - checkout the Guardian's "Offies" of 2007 - their Off-Guard Awards for the "dumbest, lamest, most pitiful, and most bizarre moments of a year that's finally, finally over." A couple of them that made us chortle:
Society Snaps (So Send Us Your Society Shots)
San Francisco socialites have been fellated for far too long by such hard-hitting glossies as 7x7 Magazine and San Francisco Magazine. Hell, even the pages from new society (excuse me, “philanthropy”) rag Benefit Magazine -- "the Lifestyle of Giving” is its tagline, God help us -- might lead you to believe that the upper crust would like nothing more than to head over to Bayview-Hunters Point and act as human shields from gunfire, saving the baby children. That is, if it weren’t for their goddamn too-tall Pacific Heights palace walls.
Caption Action
"She loves 'plebeian American food' like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches but doesn’t allow herself even a nibble, fearing an insidious slide into the next dress size." - San Francisco Magazine, on Dede Wilsey.
We Read the Glossies
Last month's winner, San Francisco Magazine: Cover: Spring '07 Style Forecast. Is it just us, or does the model on the cover look a whole lot like Carmen Electra? Sadly, it's not, but we love the orange Prada dress she's sporting. Short Stories: spring's super-short dresses are fabulous, and inspire us to do more squats. (But we think we'll stick to knee-length, because the world has seen enough hoo ha lately to last a lifetime.) href="http://sanfranmag.com/home/view_story/1534">Deconstructing Eco-chic: Tips on how to dress green, and still look good. Style Counsel: An interview with Mellisa Ceria, the founder of ShareYourLook.com, a personal style website for anybody too shy to ask a stranger, "Cute bag. Where did you get it?" Not that anybody ever asks us that every day.
We Read the Glossies
With Rita's blessing, we bring you a brand new column called "We Read the Glossies." It's just like "We Read the Weeklies" only with monthly glossies. Here we review the February issues of Diablo, San Francisco Magazine, San Jose Magazine, and 7x7.
Political Junkie: Dunk Tank!
We're begging for your help here, readers -- begging! Can someone with a digital camera PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go to this event and send us your pictures of Chris Daly getting thrown into a swimming pool? We'll throw in some SFist swag if you do! We'd go ourselves, but admission is $125 (and we don't have a digital camera anyways).
The Last Team To Arrive
We've clocked more hours in Maiden Lane's pocket-sized social club, Otis than our liver cares to think about, but the only famous people we've ever seen there were our guests. Ah, the nights we've spent scanning the crowd in vain, wondering "Is that Chandler, again?"
San Francisco Magazine Caves
We keep saying we're going to start a We Read The Glossies column to cover San Francisco Magazine and 7x7, but you know, we just can't do it. As a very wise co-editor of ours once said, "it's like reading someone else's yearbook."
Well, there's even less reason to read the rapidly-diminishing content in the local glossies this month -- San Francisco magazine unilaterally pulled an article they were planning on running about sexual harassment allegations at the Thunder Valley casino near Sacramento (side note -- shouldn't Sacramento Magazine be running that article instead? Just a thought.) -- because the new publisher of SF Magazine was worried that Thunder Valley's owner would pull their advertising out of the magazine (for the other casino they own, the Red Rock). However, the Thunder Valley owners were like, "we didn't lodge any complaints about it at all."
The new publisher, Modern Luxury, is refusing to comment, and the president of the magazine was all like, "well, yes, we did pull the piece, but it was for a lot of different reasons." The executive editor is fuming, not the least because the story then got snapped up by Salon, which ran it today. (We don't have the attention span to sit through that ad they make you sit through to read their articles, but we'll give you the link anyways.)
John Burks, a SFSU journalism prof (who was a editor at SF Magazine's former incarnation, San Francisco Focus) is hopping mad about the whole thing. "I don't think of myself as the Lone Ranger, but if you're going to do that, why do journalism? Why not just put out catalogs?" Or yearbooks!
School Credit
Give Gavin Newsom a shiny red apple! In an interview with this month's San Francisco Magazine (in blatant disregard of another interview with the Gavman in 7x7, which was optimistically labeled "exclusive"), the mayor told the reporter, "You know, five years in a row I have increased test scores. No. 1 urban school district in the state of California." As the wags at the Chron have pointed out, was Gavin sneaking into classrooms to go over the times-7 tables when no one was looking? And how exactly was he increasing test scores in those first three years when he was serving on the Board of Supes?
Folks at the SF Unified School District (which runs the schools and is independent of City Hall) are all agiggle over the statement, with the president of the teacher's union saying, "I'm glad that he wants to take credit for the work that the teachers and paraprofessionals (classroom aides) have done," and saying that they'll be sure to charge Newsom union dues next year. Superintendant Arlene Ackerman, who really was running the schools, said the comment seemed strange. And in any event, Eric Mar on the school board says that Newsom shouldn't be bragging about the schools in any event, given that Latino and African-American kids seem to be falling behind, and the trend of resegregation within the district.
To be fair, everyone in the district did say that Newsom really has done a lot for the schools since taking office, and the test scores in SF are rising steadily -- in fact, the SF average score is now 745 (with 800 considered excellent), outscoring LA (649), Sacto (688), and San Diego (726). Still, though -- we totally want to be in Mr. Newsom's homeroom class!
Okay, the picture has nothing to do with schools, but look at Gavin with Mario! We found the picture on a blog.
Glossy-ing It Up
Hey, congratulations to local magazine Dwell (on contemporary design and architecture) for winning the National Magazine Association's prestigious "Ellie" award, for best magazine with circulation from 100,000 to 250,000! Dwell beat out Baseline, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Magazine, and Teacher Magazine for the cute li'l Alexander Calder elephant statuette.
In other local Ellie Award news, San Francisco Magazine was nominated for an article about the Santa Clara Law School Innocence Project in the public interest article category, but lost to Seymour Hersh's Abu Ghraib coverage in the New Yorker. Eh, we guess there was probably no real surprise in that category, huh?
And finally, you'll all also certainly be shocked to hear that our little site here did not win (and was not even nominated for) the special "general excellence online" award, for "weblogs that have a significant amount of original content." That went to Style.com, of the Conde Nast machine.
Current TV Kickoff Party
We're on the scene at the Current TV kickoff party being MC'ed by Mos Def -- Michael Franti is currently representing EssEff. This is the new project from INdTV, "Dedicated to short form TV." The logo features a cursor, to signify "awaiting input." We're not kidding. Still, they certainly have a crowd of "connectors" assembled. And kids are smoking pot with Al Gore in the house. Who does that guy think he is with his supporting of the arts and weed smoke at his parties? Matt Gonzalez? We kid because we love. Goapele and the Crown City Rockers will be appearing later -- proper respects to the Yay Area have been made.

