There. I’ve done it. I considered; I decided; I acted. The Rubicon has been crossed, the die has been cast, [your favorite time-worn cliché here.]
I have removed the San Francisco Chronicle from my web browser bookmarks.
After several years of wondering “now why did I visit the Chron website?” and clicking on past to richer and more varied content elsewhere, I’ve abandoned the online version of the Chron just as I abandoned the print edition years ago. Why bother with it? What worthwhile content it carried was supplied by the news agencies, and its local content had become so sparse that the main news page often dribbled out into a series of obituaries.
When the San Francisco Symphony won three Grammy awards for their superlative recording of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the Chron announced that delightful news via an AP wire story that focused on an ephemeral pop singer and relegated the SFS’s triumph to a sentence. That was perhaps an extreme case, but it speaks volumes of the essential irrelevance of not only the Chronicle but of daily metro newspapers in general.
But then came the coup de grace, that straw that broke the camel’s back. (My muse, Doris, seems to be wallowing in tired clichés today.) The Chronicle had the nerve, the cheek, the effrontery, to start posting articles as bait-and-switch tactics to encourage readers to pay up. You would click on a likely-looking headline link, something along the lines of: “Gavin Newsom kicks Chris Daly in the testicles after the supervisor screams the F-word for ten minutes nonstop.” Instead of the gory details, you would be presented with a message that the story would be available for free in a few days, but if you wanted to read it right now, the cost would be…whatever.
And “whatever” was my reaction. Honestly, I don’t need to read articles about San Francisco politics or current events. Anything actually worth bothering with will pop up on the evening news. Everything else local is hogwash. I only skimmed stories about SF pols, those overpaid, overgrown adolescents in their overdecorated chambers in their overpriced city hall. I’m not interested in movie or concert reviews, never have been and never will be. I don’t follow sports. I don’t like to look at real estate. I don’t read comics. I’ll make up my own mind about restaurants, thank you very much.
There was a time when the Chron was worth buying just for the opinion page alone. Not that I put much stock in the Chron’s opinions—I’m reasonably liberal, but not that liberal. For me the attraction was the writing itself, all that crackling prose from Jon Carroll, Herb Caen et al. Nowadays the Chron offers Mark Morford, entertaining enough but too snarky for my taste, certainly not worth ponying up for a daily or weekly dose. If I want snark, I can find oodles of it for free on the Internet.
Daily metro newspapers made sense for a long time. Print on paper, lots of it, delivered fresh to your door every day, your window to the world, much more up-to-date than the movie newsreels, allowing you to control your exploration instead of shepherding you through pre-digested scenarios via the evening news on radio or TV. But the Internet provided a borderless conduit that slaughtered the daily metros. They’re dead but they don’t seem to realize it yet, dinosaurs waiting for the message to percolate slowly through the body to the brain. That model of the [City Name][Chronicle, Examiner, Times, Telegram, etc.] has become a vestige of the past, belonging in the attic next to a stack of 45 RPM singles—also quite useful in their day, but first cassettes, and now iPods, have rendered them utterly obsolete.
I have no trouble envisioning San Francisco without the Chronicle. I haven’t even looked at a print Chron in, oh, ten years. No, I wouldn’t miss it a bit.
The new model is here and it’s working. It isn’t the Internet per se, but Internet-connected mobile devices that we carry around with us. Science fiction writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke used to speak of the “Newspad”, a portable device that provided an instantly up-to-date newsfeed from around the world. Alan Kay spoke of a “Dynabook” that could act like Clarke’s Newspad, among its other talents.
My personal favorite Newspad device is the iPad and the applications that act like news aggregators, gathering info from the major news services (Reuters, AP, etc.) and categorizing it by subject. Both Fluent News and Early Edition aggregate from multiple sources, while Reuters NewsPro and the BBC apps are single-feed.
And I can use those apps with a phone, or my iPad, or similar applications on my computer. I wouldn’t object to paying a subscription fee for an aggregator like Fluent News.
But I object to paying for stale news delivered by a galumphing diplodocus of a local metro newspaper. I bear no ill-will towards the Chron or any other metro daily, mind you. It’s just that I’ve moved on and they haven’t. I made one last visit to the SF Chron’s web page and discovered that it is now a full subscription site; no come-on teasers any more, no nothing but a sign-in page unless you open your wallet.
May they live well and prosper, but frankly, I doubt it.