The SF Weekly is no more

In the SF Chronicle:

After more than 40 years, SF Weekly, San Francisco’s last-standing alt weekly, will cease publication “for the foreseeable future” at the end of the month, the paper’s editor in chief, Carly Schwartz, confirmed Friday. The weekly, which had a circulation of 65,000, was sold, along with the San Francisco Examiner, to Clint Reilly Communications last December. In an email, Schwartz said the decision was made to pause SF Weekly to “double down on our efforts with the Examiner.”

Sorry to see that. The city needs as many independent media voices as possible. The internet is what makes print journalism less viable, since it takes away a lot of advertising that print publications rely on.

From the story:

“The loss is incalculable,” said Joe Eskenazi, the managing editor of Mission Local who worked at SF Weekly for nine years starting in 2007. “A robust alt weekly tells you the most unvarnished version of what’s going on in the city....It doesn’t play by the niceties of daily journalism. “San Francisco has never needed a functional alt weekly more.”

That's an idealized version of how SF Weekly actually performed over the years. 

It pandered to what it apparently thought was young readers with positive stories about graffiti/tagging vandalism. But so did the city's other now-defunct weekly, the Bay Guardian: Local intellectuals betray the city and SF Weekly enables vandalism---again. (Even the Chronicle isn't above that!)

That the two weeklies were often deficient the same way prompted this: Matt Smith and Tim Redmond: Peas in a pod way back in 2005.

Like the Chronicle, the SF Weekly ran with the lemmings on Vision Zero and traffic safety: SF Weekly, Vision Zero, and reality. 

And the failure by all three publications on Masonic Avenue can't go unmentioned 

Nor should the failure on Islamic terrorism be forgotten: SF's "alternative" media: Profile in lameness.