What's this? Keith Kelly says that Hearst is sitting on a $1 billion "war chest," and that the company "is said to have revenues over $7 billion and to be profitable — as well as debt-free." Hey Hearst, Conde Nast is calling—they want to know what your secret is! For making money! Haha! Man. Somebody should definitely have the Hearst CEO repeat that one to Si Newhouse at some point. At a party or something. Just slide right over and lay it on him. That would be so funny.


Current TV is laying off 80 staffers, about a fifth of its work force. Interesting quote from them! "This re-organization was not the result of a need to cut costs. Current Media will have its most profitable year." That's a new sort of explanation, for this type of thing. Our condolences to the departed.


Conde Nast is doing something related to the internet! Says here Conde is "embracing magazine Web sites more as enhanced platforms for the titles' editorial missions rather than simply as companions to the print product." Does that mean they will have good magazine websites instead of not so good ones? Time will tell!


The Ombudsman of PBS is now forced to write columns on the topic of whether Sesame Street characters are biased against Fox News. People are stupid.

Oh, sad newspaper industry. Does anyone believe in you anymore?

Private equity billionaire Warren Hellman was to be the savior of the San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst's cash-bleeding newspaper, which has laid off scores of journalists as recently as last week. But talks with the newspaper and the union weren't as interesting to Hellman, ultimately, as a sexy new idea: Become a sort of Arianna Huffington of the San Francisco-area news market.

So Hellman is now setting up an online (primarily) news operation for the region, according to reports in the San Francisco Business Times and New York Times. Like Huffington's Huffington Post, the venture's staff will include a hefty dose of amateur reporters, including students rom the University of California, Berkeley's graduate journalism school and possibly, according to some of the initial discussions we heard about, local volunteers. Unlike HuffPo, however, it would be a nonprofit, and will work with the local public radio station KQED.

It's a smart move: Even as they greedily snap up iPhones and Macbooks, the Bay Area's tech savvy readers have been abandoning the print edition of the Chronicle, whose circulation fell more than 20 percent over five years to 370,000. The paper lost around $4 million per month last year. Hellman's gambit is also commendable. By pumping $5 million of his foundation's cash into the venture, Hellman seeds a money stream that should help at least some laid off local journalists

But, in an interview with the New York Times, Hellman was cruelly blunt about the loser in all of this: papers like the Chronicle. Asked about whether he was ushering them to an early grave, Hellman said:

I think that demise might be inevitable, anyway. This might put journalism, broadly defined, on a much more stable foundation.

Wow. Perhaps the Times should ask its own executives that same question: The paper confirmed in its own news columns it has been in lengthy talks with Hellman's group "about the possibility of supplying [the group's] reporting to a San Francisco edition that the [Times] plans to start."

Newspapers: Even other newspapers relish feasting on their corpses. Strictly in the interest of the "civic good," of couse.

(Pic: Hellman, by AP.)

Check it out, some food blogger went and ate at the New York Times cafeteria and gave it a respectable two star rating. "It was an ok fried chicken, but honestly I prefer Popeyes because they have better skin," he says. "The pie was everything that you could ask for in a company cafeteria dessert." Something for the Hobo NYT to be proud of.


Slate media curmudgeon Jack Shafer reveals he's way crazy! "Blessed as I am with insomnia, I get up and read the front pages of the major dailies at about 2 a.m. every day." Does he go back to sleep afterwards? Does he stay up for six more hours and then go to work? Does he smoke lots of meth? Uppers, downers, an Elvis-like cycle? Tell us more about this bizarre wee hours news addiction. We like Jack Shafer, good fella!


Grub Street suggests the restaurateurs that should have been on Graydon Carter's annual New Establishment list, if not for the fact that Graydon Carter is himself a jealous restaurateur.


Media success story! Examiner.com has bought NowPublic, a "citizen journalism" site, for around $25 million. That is a lot of scratch, for citizen journalism! The citizen journalists will themselves receive $0.


Need to rent out a $20,000 penthouse in this ridiculously poor real estate market? Rent it out to a magazine! Hearst is renting a badass apartment in Soho for its Esquire "Ultimate Bachelor Pad," because money is no object when it comes to publishing brand extensions, or ultimate bachelors.

When the Chronicle's website this morning yanked a column lambasting the mayor, charges of political cowardice quickly followed. The paper was scared, but not of the mayor: Frightened for its business, the paper is now charging for some Web content.

Vlae Kershner, News Director for the site, writes that the column in question, by former Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein (pictured), was never supposed to be online in the first place. "It's subscriber-only content that was posted by mistake," he told us.

Following months of discussions about doing this sort of thing, the paper has decided to inaugurate its first premium section, containing Bronstein's column (see the email Chronicle editor Ward Bushee sent us, below). It's a small experiment, but an extraordinary step: SFGate has historically been perhaps the most open newspaper website in the country; unlike other big-city papers, it never even tried to charge for access to its extensive archives.

It's odd that the Chronicle would choose opinion content for its first premium content experiment, given the experience of the The New York Times. The Times abandoned its effort to charge for opinion content, TimesSelect, after discovering that a paywall diminished the paper's voice and reduced its advertising revenue. Plus the market for political and cultural opinion is oversaturated; Bronstein's opinion pieces will likewise be a tough sell. The market pays no attention to newsroom hierarchies that put columnists and former editors up on pedestals.

More salable would be the Chronicle's least glamorous work, local news reporting, and any other beat it truly owns, like restaurant reviews. In politics and food alike, though, the paper faces competition from a growing corps of bloggers who could permanently steal way readers. For its own stake, the Chronicle should make sure it will be able to abandon any future experiments more readily than it launched the current one.

Chronicle editor Bushee's email:

Here's the deal. Phil's column was created from the start to be a print-only column in the Monday Chronicle. When we first started talking about the column, Phil and I agreed to try this as a low-stakes experiment. The experiment is not indicative of any larger plan by the Chronicle, SFGate or Hearst. It is not the start of a premium content imitative or a pay wall. But it was designed to test how different content models can serve different audiences. Each week Phil reaches a significant online audience with his blog, which is not available in print. By introducing a column by Phil that is different in its content and mission from his blog, we can see if it adds value to the printed paper by giving readers unique content that they could not get free online. As with any experiment, it will be evaluated at some point to see if we stick with it or change it.



Unfortunately, the brief appearance of the column on SFGate this week made some people think we were pulling it off because of the content. As you surmised in your note, that was not the case. The column was posted for a short time on SFGate through a misunderstanding and then pulled down when it was discovered.

(Pic" Bronstein, via the Chronicle)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.While Conde Nast is fighting off financial decline and swine flu, rival publisher Hearst is doing marginally better! Hearst's mags are losing less advertising than competitors, and some of its new titles are showing great promise. The NYT attributes this to "against the grain" practices like keeping articles offline and raising newsstand prices, but it may just be the lack of swine flu giving them the advantage.

The New York Times raised its prices today, to $2 weekly and $5 on Sunday. Since we just saw the "worst quarter in modern history for American newspapers," it seems fair. [Pic: Newyorkist]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The wait is over, America: Starbucks has become the official joe of Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough. Will Joe Scarborough still be able to impartially report on the coffee industry in light of this new partnership? Who cares?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Bill Rancic, winner of The Apprentice, was assigned the task of replacing the Chicago Sun-Times building with condos. A tipster sends this photo: COME AND GET EM BILL. [Clarification: this pic is from 2004. So, the poignant moment has passed.]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Giant Magazine tells us that a rumor from last Friday that they're going to fold after their next issue is "false": "GIANT is currently working on its September/Fall Fashion issue, on newsstands early August," says a spokesperson.

Socialite Hearst has, until now, been careful not to go this far; when she did the cover of French Playboy, she was careful to note there was "no nudity for me" and that the publication was "very high fashion." Similarly, the model-heiress emphasized the "high fashion/couture" aspect of her lingerie shoot for an "upscale" panty brand.

Hearst's new topless spread is wrapped, of course, in the same sort of market positioning: She's in an upscale fashion glossy, GQ, and the Italian edition to boot. The model's poses are as stiff as ever, but they're also "low key [and] artistic," according to the blog Drunken Stepfather.

Well, we guess. She's still taking off her shirt, which is way more than her otherwise shameless protocelebrity competitor Julia Allison had to do to get a big Condé Nast cover. How is it the willowy Gotham heiress has been outclassed by a brassy social-climber from the Midwest? By making the same mistake as so many luxury retailers: responding to hard times by cheapening the product in the mind of the consumer. Not necessarily by taking off her shirt — you're only young once, and you might as well take your racy pictures then — but by doing so in such a marginal venue.

UPDATE: And, of course (we should have known), Hearst has gone topless before in an even more obscure venue, which you can see here or here (NSFW links, duh). So she's actually shimmying her way up the stripper pole of minor fame into ever-slightly-classier outlets. Dutch Esquire next? Hearst will make money on both sides of the deal.

(Pics from Italian GQ via Drunken Stepfather)

Did we say "kindled"? Amazon's Kindle, the e-book reader, has indeed sparked fever dreams among the ailing lords of print. The New York Times has paused from chronicling its own doom to contemplate its salvation — a large-format Kindle, better suited to displaying newspaper-like pages. Hearst, News Corp., and other print-media concerns are pushing their own devices, loath to grant Amazon so much power over their future — but they are fumbling, while Amazon may introduce its newspaper-friendly device as soon as Wednesday.

What a petty concern to worry about, rather than asking if that future even exists!

The argument for e-readers goes like this: Newspapers and magazines will once again be able to charge for subscriptions to support the cost of production, while shedding the expense of printing presses. Readers will pay for the convenience of getting the news delivered to a device.

That prediction fundamentally misunderstands the lessons of the Kindle, which made books available in a convenient digital format, on an appealing device, for the first time. Downloading five books for the beach is vastly more appealing than packing them.

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

There is one prospective market for this: The old, who may be so attached to printed media that they will accept an electronic substitute. Hearst digital chieftain Phil Bronstein, the former San Francisco Chronicle editor, told Maureen Dowd that the industry's best hope was that people would live longer, so those trained to read newspapers will stick to the habit.

The obvious converse of Bronstein's feeble hope: The young will never learn to read newspapers and magazines again, having grown up reading online. Why would they switch to a product like the Kindle?

Like the libertarian wingnuts who would rather flee to science-fiction cities on the sea, escape to outer space, or cosset themselves in an online fantasy world rather than live in reality, the addled lords of print like Bronstein would rather dream of a technological rescue than face the hard work of survival.

What newspapers and magazines need to do is obvious: Build appealing websites, and sell them better. But that would require changing.

We've never actually read the magazine, but judging from the covers it appears Bobby Flay, who insists on grilling absolutely every sort of food, like a real man, plays a prominent role. Sigh.

Still, we understand the impulse to take the publication. In its on upscale way, Food Network is capitalizing on the same fear of privation as those booming homeless newspapers. As a Hearst VP told Ad Age,

"Dining in is the recession's dining out."

And "not starving" will be the depression's "dining in," but there's no need to spook the advertisers just yet.

NB to anyone taking this magazine: The network's best content is already transcribed here, for free.

[Ad Age]

A tipster tells us the magazine had a sales meeting, and it wasn't pretty. According to our tipster: Publisher Kevin O'Malley told the staff that even though Esquire did (very relatively) better than rival GQ last quarter, it wasn't good enough—he wants them to be picking up the market share lost by Portfolio and Best Life. Other complaints: GQ got more National Magazine Award nominations, and some high end advertisers think Esquire is becoming too "gimmicky." Which it is!

Remember the magazine's flashing "E-Ink" cover last year, that was supposed to be the start of a revolution? Supposedly Ford was so upset with the execution of its ad on the inside cover that it wanted credit back. Financially, our tipster characterizes last year as a "disaster," and says this year will be even worse. They say there is huge pressure to deliver a big issue in September (the "video issue"), although no one sounds very optimistic.

There's also a rumor going around among Esquire staffers that Hearst might shutter or sell Esquire and Popular Mechanics and "focus solely on the female demographic." We ran this by a Hearst PR person, who dismissed it as "Blatantly false."

UPDATE: Another Esquire spokesperson sent us this additional statement [in fairness—our tipster may be referring to a compilation of issues at the magazine rather than ones that were specifically discussed in a single meeting]:

"The rumors in your item are patently untrue. There was no such meeting yesterday. A sales meeting took place on Tuesday, but there was no 'chewing out,' and not one thing mentioned in this article was discussed."

UPDATE 2: We also received this email from Jay Ward of Ford's public affairs dept., saying the company was not unhappy with its Esquire ad:

I write to you from Ford Motor Company with regards to the story you ran today regarding Esquire and the E-Ink cover. In the article, you claim that Ford was so upset with the E-Ink execution on the inside cover that we wanted credit back.

I would like to very clearly state on behalf of Ford Motor Company that this was not the case. Indeed, the opposite is true. We were delighted with the E-Ink cover and the huge amount of coverage we got on a worldwide basis for the innovation. The reason we partnered with Esquire in the first place was to do something that had never been done before to promote a car that was a real departure from the norm for Ford. As such, the E-Ink application was exactly what we had in mind when we first planned the advertising campaign, and our partnership with Esquire was one that we were, and still are, delighted with.

On a broader note, we continue to advertise with Esquire and many of the Hearst publications and remain committed to the work that they do - they continue to deliver the audience that we at Ford want to be reaching out to and we see no reason that this stance will change in the future.

[As always, if you'd like to leak some dirt about your magazine, email us.]

Local billionaire Warren Hellman (pictured), a private-equity kingpin, joined with other "prominent San Francisco business leaders" to propose leading such a conversion, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

The Chronicle is something of a bellwether for the rest of the newspaper industry, if only because the transition to online news consumption is so far advanced in the tech-obsessed Bay Area. In the past five years, the paper's circulation has declined to 370,345 from more than 480,000. It lost more than $50 million last year, the latest in a series of deep annual losses over nearly a decade.

Owner Hearst Corp. is slashing expenses and considering closing or selling the paper.

Hellman and team want to prevent that, but only if Hearst keeps playing the role of sugar daddy. From the Business Times:

The proposal would be for a nonprofit corporation "to take over the Chronicle," with Hearst Corp. continuing to provide some philanthropic support, [San Francisco attorney and power broker Bill] Coblentz said. Details remain sketchy. It's unclear if the proposal is being seriously considered.

So, to recap: The Chronicle will keep losing money. Hearst will keep losing money. But Warren Hellman's nonprofit corporation gets to own and control the paper. This is the sort of dealmaking that made Hellman a billionaire. And given Hearst's track record, the company just might take the offer.

(More likely: Hearst finds a way to sell to notorious cheapskate Dean Singleton, who bought up most of the region's other failing newspapers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already on the case, handling some pesky antitrust provisions.)

[Subscriber-only link: Business Times]

(Disclaimer: I used to work at the San Francisco Business Times.)

Hearst tried to sell the Seattle P-I before they fired most of the staff and took it online-only, but they said they "failed to find a buyer." Although, it turns out, they did have an offer from a group of local investors: "Let's just say it was less than $10." Sadly, Hearst probably should have taken it.


Jake Tapper is blocking bloggers from reading his Twitter feed. Ah well. Use the time that you would have been reading Jake Tapper's Twitter feed to comb obsessively through video archives until you find a clip of Jake Tapper licking his comb like Paul Wolfowitz in Fahrenheit 9/11. That would be funny.

That whole Michelle Obama arm fetish? Not new. In the very first ever edition of the NYT's Sunday Styles page 17 years ago, the lead story was about a fetish for Linda Hamilton's arms, from Terminator. Amazingly, trend stories never become irrelevant.


James Rainey worries that cutbacks at newspapers will allow political consultants to plant smears with inexperienced young reporters, unlike the old days, when they planted smears with experienced reporters.

Oh no, Barbara Walters says she's planning her retirement "in the not-too-distant future." It seems like the media establishment just isn't ready for 100-year-olds.


Think it's bad being a newspaper these days? Try being a newsprint company. Then you would really be screwed. The bright side: according to an investment banker, "within the pantheon of media sectors, the newspaper business is actually still one of the better ones." The worst media sector: Silent films.

Maudlin fact: the P-I is Seattle's oldest business, making the whole thing sad in a historic sense, at least, like when the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News folded a few weeks ago.

Silver lining: The company will continue to run the website, "making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product." Although for the handful of reporters who survive, the pay will suck.
Also, at least Seattle still has another paper! This is just the latest in the "Death of two-paper towns that are not New York," which will be continuing for the rest of this year.

Mystery: Uh, since it's been pretty clear for months that the paper was going to die, why the fuck did Hearst wait so long to announce it, and force the reporters there to go investigating the date of their own demise? That's cold-blooded. Bad karma, Hearst.

Other than that, this is as expected. Miami, San Antonio, Minneapolis—all fair guesses of who could be next. [Seattle PI]

The editorial workers would invest some of their own money, a Guild representative told the Appeal. But they could hardly acquire the Chronicle on their own, even assuming a heavy markdown from Hearst's 2000 price of $660 million.

Possible buyers fall into a few broad categories:

Old San Francisco money: There's been chatter among Chronicle journalists for years about the possibility of a local investor like private-equity billionaire Warren Hellman or Gap founder Don Fisher buying the paper. It's hard to imagine either of those red-blooded capitalists giving up on the idea of a profitable local newspaper, but then one never puts money into a cash-hemorrhaging hometown paper for purely rational reasons.

New dot-com money: If it's hard to imagine local elders funding a (purposely!) non-profit Chronicle, it's even harder to picture Silicon Valley's many Google million- and billion-aires doing likewise. Newspaper philanthropy would hardly be a hot topic of conversation among young founders on the Web 2.0 cocktail circuit.

Craig Newmark: The San Francisco-based Craigslist founder likes to think of himself as being in a different, entirely more altruistic class of startup founder. In the case of newspapers, he does stand apart, and not just because of his instrumental role in ushering along the decline of print journalism: Newmark has a peculiar (for the tech world) obsession with journalism and politics, leading to investments in content aggregator Daylife and citizen journalism initiative NewAssignment.net and advisory roles at the Center for Citizen Media and Sunlight Foundation.

But even assuming he wanted to buy the Chronicle, it would seem a stretch for Newmark to do so on his own. Craigslist throws off maybe $100 million or $130 million in annual profits, which Newmark must split with other shareholders. The Chronicle is losing $50 million a year just operating, to say nothing of the purchase price.

With enough cash from employees, a fire-sale price from Hearst and maybe one or two more rich investors, it's possible to imagine Newmark picking up the paper, should some sort of expensive guilt complex compel him to do so.

The Chronicle would then be the largest nonprofit paper in the country, ahead of the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times.

More likely, though, would-be newspaper philanthropists will come to the same conclusion as would-be newspaper investors: It makes little sense to invest in fixing the old problems of a dying industry when you can net much more glory or profit starting from scratch.

Northern California's dominant daily loses $50 million per year, give or take a few million, and owner Hearst is threatening to shut it down. So it should come as little surprise that management's demands pretty much mirror the tentative "agreement" reached late Monday.

Chronicle bosses sought in contract renegotiation the right to fire people without regard for seniority and to slash "vacation, sick time, and maternity/paternity leave" and to "outsource some jobs to nonunionized employees."

What did they get? The "ability to lay off employees without regard to seniority... reductions in vacation time, sick leave and maternity/paternity leave... and the right for the company to subcontract any work," according to the Guild.

The silver lining, for employees: two weeks of severance for every year of service.

Even assuming the deal is approved by union members, it only clears the way for more questions about the paper. How many layoffs? Will management be able to win similar concessions from its Teamsters local? Will it eventually demand still more concessions from a union that (we're told) at one point in recent negotiations offered to replace vacation with unpaid leave and cut paychecks?

Increasingly, though, the finer points of contract clauses and benefits are obscured by the bigger question of whether the most internet-addled bunch of readers in the country can support a large metro daily at all. Chronicle staffers won't be the only ones intensely curious about the answer.

Even as it's busy shutting down the Seattle paper and (maybe) combining some papers in Texas, Hearst has found the time to tell the union at the San Francisco Chronicle to either give in to the company's demands or face 225 job cuts. Winding down the entire newspaper industry is hard work.

That whole NAACP protest against the New York Post over the Sean Delonas monkey cartoon thing wasn't as unified as it appears; Nat Hentoff reports that the NAACP actually had one critic removed from its annual meeting after he said "Demagoguery is not the standard of effective leadership in addressing serious social justice issues." Related: Nat Hentoff is now reporting for the "Daily News Tribune." Times are bad.

College newspapers are floundering financially because of weak ad revenue, just like real papers! Solution here.

More on Brooklyn blogger Robert Guskind, who died this week of a reported drug overdose.

Tania deLuzuriaga, the former reporter who quit after it came out that she had an affair with a Miami school superintendent while covering him, has found a new job! She's now a flack. [Joke joke joke]. Well good for her for being employed, we say.

Metro reporter Hector Castro got one of maybe 20 job offers at the transformed PI. How was it?

He said the offer increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.

We'd welcome you to the exciting future of journalism, Hector, if you hadn't turned down the gig as "too tech-oriented." That's an awfully polite way of putting it.

1. San Antonio is 200 miles away from Houston.
2. San Antonio is 200 miles away from Houston.

According to our tipster: "In theory, each paper will still have a base of operations in each home city. There hasn't been an official announcement yet, but everybody knows and all the staff at least suspect it."

Hearst has already threatened to shut down the money-burning San Francisco Chronicle, and they cut 75 newsroom jobs in San Antonio just a week ago. And don't forget the imminent death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer! So this rumor could certainly be true, as a new frontier in cost-cutting. Still: two failing papers combine to form... a larger failing paper. [Details or denials? Email us]

Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

Hearst's e-reader will be larger than the Kindle — more like an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. And it will use technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass. startup Hearst backed more than a decade ago. Hearst hopes to distribute electronic versions of its magazines and newspapers on the device, which a Hearst executive told Fortune will be out later this year.

It's like a terminal cancer patient putting faith in some herbalist's shark-bone treatment.

"The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?" asks Fortune. Uh, no. The question is whether people will give up their iPhones and netbooks for these new readers. Cheap laptops and smartphones are an irreversible trend. Factories in Japan, China, and Korea thunder out the mass-produced parts for these devices, which make their economics compelling. And a PC has the virtue of not being designed by a publisher more interested in protecting an old way of doing a business than serving readers.

Hearst has exercised its E Ink fetish before, when Esquire used it for an expensive, pointless cover. But the fact that Hearst owns a stake in E Ink is the silliest possible reason to champion the technology. Economists would call that a sunk cost: It's money already spent.

Newspaper and magazine publishers seem desperate to find some new trick to preserve the scarcity on which they used to profit. In a world overflowing with media, that is impossible. And editors and publishers are not clever technological tricksters. The E Ink reader will start out black-and-white. Wait, aren't the glossy photos and gorgeous layouts why we pick up magazine sin the first place?

What they ought to be doing is fixing their websites: Adding comments everywhere, publicly displaying the comments and pageviews stories garner, and — crucially — adjusting the story mix in light of that information. It's unlikely to happen. The makers of magazines are so used to dreaming up story ideas in their skyscraper aeries. It will never occur to them that their readers might actually be smarter than they are.

Smart enough, at any rate, not to buy a gadget designed by a magazine guy.

(Image via Gizmodo)

The absence of a strong newspaper, a contender with the New York Times, Washington Post, or even Los Angeles Times, has long frustrated the intelligentsia of the Bay Area. Instead, we have a sorry ink-on-dead-trees product that even some employees call the San Francisco Comical.

The joke is that the Chronicle isn't really Hearst's paper. The chain bought it in 2000 after publishing the San Francisco Examiner, the one-time "Monarch of the Dailies," for more than a century, and overseeing its slow decline. (Time wrote about the Examiner's troubles almost a half-century ago.)

In the 2000 deal, Hearst merged the staffs of the Examiner and the Chronicle into a single Chronicle newsroom, all but guaranteeing losses. And indeed, in its overstaffed state, the paper has not made a profit since 2001, and lost $50 million in 2008. (The Examiner, meanwhile, has passed through various owners and is now a sporadically distributed free tabloid owned by railroad billionaire Philip Anschutz.)

So Hearst is stuck with a title to which it has no sentimental attachment, which shows no signs of making money, in a tough market (the region has 21 daily newspapers spread around 11 counties). The publisher has already threatened to shutter the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The trend towards reading news online is better established in the technophiliac Bay Area than elsewhere. It no longer seems so unfathomable that the Chronicle might close. The shame is that not many people might mourn its passing.

Update: SFist has a memo from Chronicle publisher Frank Vega.