Hey everybody, SFist is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week! To honor the occasion, we look back with fondness on these two madcap decades of this site, and the writers who made us the best smart-ass news publication in town.  

Readers, it has come to our attention that this very website SFist turns 20 years old this week! Yes, the very first ever SFist article ever was posted 20 years ago today, on July 18, 2004. And for the next week or so, we’ll be doing a few of these self-indulgent nostalgia posts, to celebrate these 20 whole years of making Gavin Newsom jokes, laughing it up over tech shuttle mishaps, doing the Niners, and so many other things that we were privileged enough to have you click on.  

The very first SFist post in July 2004 stated, “The SFist team is so happy to bring you this journal and digest of the Bay Area. We just love this place so much we had to explore it, read about it, photograph it and finally write it all down for those lucky enough to live here and smart enough to come visit.”

2004 was the era of flip phones, a time when R. Kelly and Kanye West were considered highly respected musicians, and the star of Conan the Destroyer and Kindergarten Cop was somehow the Governor of California. These were the early blogging days when Gawker was big, and tools like Blogger and Movable Type spawned a small army of quirky local news sites here in SF like Bernalwood, Sexpigeon, Uptown Almanac, and Burrito Justice. SFist joined these ranks, as a mostly volunteer publication, covering the local news with the style of snark popularized by upstart national sites like Wonkette, and Gawker.  

Remember this old logo? It graced the masthead on the work of so many great writers that SFist has been lucky enough to have over the years. We managed to get contributions from beloved local scribes like Violet Blue, Daisy Barringer, and Beth Spotswood, our one-time food writer Lauren Sloss now appears in the New York Times, SFist alum Caleb Pershan moved on to the Chronicle, and Jack Morse has gone national on Mashable. We also once enjoyed regular opera and symphony coverage from Cedric Westphal for over a decade.

But our two most influential early writers were probably longtime editor-in-chief Brock Keeling, and our co-founder Eve Batey (these days a Vanity Fair and Chronicle contributor, co-editor of the analytical true-crime newsletter “Best Evidence,” and co-host of its podcast, The Docket).

Batey and Rita Hao famously came up with the idea for SFist with friend Jackson in 2004 over a night of El Farolito burritos and Doc’s Clock drinks. The site was a spin-off of New York’s Gothamist, and we were part of that band of offshoots who called ourselves the Ist-A-Verse.

“I'll always be grateful to Gothamist founders Jen Chung and Jake Dobkin for allowing Rita, Jackson, and me to start SFist in 2004,” Batey tells us. “They offered the perfect mix of support and guidance while giving us the latitude to create a website that reflected the city. I'm also so grateful to Brock Keeling, the editor of the site when I returned a decade later, in 2014: He built our little idiosyncratic project into a powerhouse.”

Indeed he did.

“I started at SFist as lead editor in 2007,” Keeling tells us from Los Angeles. “After years as clubs editor (which was an actual gig back in the day) at SF Weekly, I landed the job after meeting Eve Batey at Otis, a onetime watering hole in Union Square frequented by dot-com 1.0-era worker bees and politicos, including Gavin Newsom.”

“I had a lot of trial and error. But also a lot of fun,” he adds. “The pay was scant and the workload was staggering, but it helped hone my skills as a writer. As a publication that curated articles, we were allowed to take a sharper (or “snarky” is what it was called back in the day) tone. And breaking news stories, like the San Bruno PG&E pipeline explosion, taught me the value of local news and community.”

SFist explored this community for years, with reports on deplorable teens, the “Burrito Bracket” craze of the mid-2010s, coverage of Bay to Breakers high jinks, and kooky public figures running for SF mayor. Jay Barmann took over as editor-in-chief in the fall of 2014, and in that era of giddy landlords charging sky-high rents for often sub-par real estate, he launched the Apartment Sadness column — which for a time captured the dark humor with which many of us operated in a real estate market geared toward well-paid, transient tech workers.

The site grew to its largest staffing level ever in those years, with three full-time and one part-time writer (Eve) — these days we operate with just two full-time. And starting under Keeling's leadership circa 2010 and continuing into the later Obama Era, the site began to mature out of its quick-paragraph blog days to a more curated and thorough look at daily local news and culture, covering everything from tech shuttle troubles to the steady rise in bipping (car break-ins).

And after a bizarre, egomaniacal public figure ran for US President and won, it presaged some dark days for SFist, literally.

"2016 and 2017 were proabably two of the worst years to be in the news business, but that almost feels silly to say now," says Barmann. "It seems like every year since has brought its own helping of terrible — and a pandemic! — but the end of 2016 really felt like a special era of misery at the time. John Oliver did his own 'fuck you' segment to the year itself, where they set the numbers 2016 on fire. It was the year of the Pulse Orlando shooting, the untimely death of Prince due to fentanyl, the deaths of thousands in the Syrian civil war, and the Bastille Day massacre in France, as well as Trump's surprise election. I wrote a letter from the editor in the wake of the devastating Ghost Ship fire in Oakland that December, honestly asking how we as a community were supposed to process so much death, division, and sadness. Little did I know."

About a month and a half after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, a Republican billionaire who had taken an interest in local media, acquired the Gothamist website network, merging it with a pair of lesser-known local news sites he'd started called DNAinfo that existed in Chicago and New York. And then just eight months after that, after an endless stream of protests in the Bay Area that turned into street brawls, in early November 2017, Ricketts abruptly shut all of the sites down over a unionization dispute with the Gothamist staff. SFist would consequently go dark for the next fifteen months.

"It broke my heart a few years later when the subsequent owner of the entire Gothamist network [shut it down]," Batey recalls, speaking of the Ricketts affair. “But that also made me realize how knee-shakingly fearful people are who have built their profits via employee exploitation... So I guess I'm grateful for that life lesson, too, as it instilled in me the importance of worker solidarity."

But SFist came back from the dead in February 2019, with Barmann back at the helm. Ricketts had sold the Gothamist sites’ archives to WNYC, which now runs Gothamist. (Gothamist celebrated its 20th anniversary two years ago.) And WNYC sold the SFist name and archives to Impress3 Media in San Francisco, and SFist has been back up and running ever since.

"As a San Francisco native, I was always a fan of SFist before we got involved," says Impress3 Media founder Zack Chen. "When we saw that the other Gothamist sites were gaining new owners, but no statement was made about SFist, I sent a few messages via Twitter. That's how the deal got going."

We take none of this for granted, because online media is a tough racket. Just last week, our former sister site LAist cut 28 staffers, so we’re grateful for every day we get to publish this website. And there’s no way we could do it without you, our readers, and it is only because of your interest that SFist has survived these 20 years. And for that, we thank you so much for joining us on this wild ride.

Related: The City that Knows How [SFist]

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