San Francisco Chronicle

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The 2005-07-27 front page of "The Voice of the West"
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	Hearst Communications
Publisher	Frank J. Vega
Editor	Ward H. Bushee
Founded	1865
Price	US$ 0.75 + tax Daily US$ 1.50 + tax Sunday
Headquarters	901 Mission Street San Francisco, California 94103 United States
Circulation	370,345 Daily 424,603 Sunday^[1]

Website: sfgate.com

The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young.^[2] The paper grew along with San Francisco and was the largest circulation newspaper on the West Coast of the United States in 1880; today it is Northern California's largest newspaper, serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area, but distributed throughout Northern California, including the Sacramento area and North Coast. Today only the Los Angeles Times exceeds the Chronicle's circulation on the West Coast, while the paper is ranked 12th by circulation nationally.^[3]

[edit] History

Between World War II and 1965, thanks to new editor Scott Newhall and colorful columnists including Pauline Phillips, who wrote under the name "Dear Abby," Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, and Herb Caen, the newspaper grew in circulation to become the city's largest, overtaking the rival San Francisco Examiner. The de Young family controlled the paper, via the Chronicle Publishing Company, until July 27, 2000, when it was sold to Hearst Communications, Inc., who owned the Examiner. Following the sale, the Hearst Corporation transferred the Examiner to the Fang family, publisher of the San Francisco Independent and AsianWeek, along with a $66 million dollar subsidy.^[4] Under the new owners, the Examiner became a free tabloid, leaving the Chronicle as the only daily broadsheet newspaper in San Francisco.

In 1949, the de Young family founded KRON (Channel 4), the Bay Area's third television station. Until the mid 1960s, the station (along with KRON-FM), operated from the basement of the Chronicle Building, and then it moved to its present studios on Van Ness Avenue. KRON was sold in 1999 and, after years of being San Francisco's NBC affiliate, became an independent station in 2002.

As of 2008 the publisher of the Chronicle is Frank J. Vega, the executive vice president and editor is Ward H. Bushee and the editorial page editor is John Diaz. The publishers of the Chronicle prior to Frank Vega included George Cameron (1925-1955), Charles de Young Thieriot (1955-1977), and Richard Tobin Thieriot (1977-1994), among others.

The online version of the newspaper, SFGate, is led by vice president Michele Slack and executive producer Kevin Skaggs. As well as publishing the San Francisco Chronicle online, SFGate adds other features not available in the print version, such as blogs and podcasts. SFGate was one of the earliest major market newspaper websites to be launched, having done so in 1993.

The paper has received the Pulitzer Prize on a number of occasions. Despite an illustrious and long history, the paper's news reportage is not as extensive as in the past. The current day Chronicle has followed the trend of other American newspapers, devoting increasing attention to local and regional news and cultural and entertainment criticism to the detriment of the paper's traditionally strong national and international reportage, though the paper does maintain a Washington, D.C., bureau. This increased focus on local news is a response to the competition from other Bay Area newspapers including the resurrected San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News. Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada received the 2004 George Polk Award for Sports Reporting.^[5]

Fainaru-Wada and Williams were recognized for their work on uncovering the BALCO scandal, which linked San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds to performance-enhancing drugs. While the two above-named reporters broke the news, they are by no means the only sports writers of note at the Chronicle. The Chronicle's sports section--called The Sporting Green as it was once printed on green-tinted pages--is staffed with two dozen writers. The section's best-known writers are its columnists: Bruce Jenkins, Gwenn Knapp, Scott Ostler, and Ray Ratto.

Another area of note is the architecture column by John King; the Chronicle is still one of the few American papers to present a regular column on architectural issues. The paper also has regular weekly sections devoted to 'Food', 'Home & Garden', and 'Wine', the latter of which is unique. The Sunday editions contain a San Francisco Chronicle Magazine that regularly focuses on the previously mentioned topics. In early 2006 a new section, '96 Hours', was added to the Thursday edition of the paper, covering entertainment from that day through Sunday.

Circulation has fallen precipitously since the heyday of the dot-com boom from 1997 to 2001. The Chronicle's circulation dropped by 16.6% between 2004 and 2005 to 400,906;^[6] in 2006, daily circulation dropped to 373,805.^[7] In response, the newspaper has cut back on local news coverage and takes many national and international stories from the Associated Press instead of relying on Chronicle correspondents.^{[citation needed]} There have also been major cutbacks in staff, with one fourth of the newsroom being let go in 2007. At the same time, the online edition has continued its growth and in 2006 SFGate was fifth among U.S. newspaper websites with 5.2 million unique users per month.^{[citation needed]}