Hah! I'm not alone. Local bloggers love to hate the SF Chronicle. Or is it hate to hate? Honestly there are some true gems buried within that paper, buried being the key word. Some get it: Benny Evangelista did some nice legwork for his article about podcasting (and even made a podcast,) so he must be up with the scene. Others are shockingly late to the game.
Tiger Beat: Today Steve posts his admonishment, Chron clueless on blogging. Yesterday they covered Supervisor Chris Daly's new blog, noting a) it's on the taxpayer's dime, b) in blogs people can say stuff, and c) in a blog, Daly could add links "that take visitors to noncity Web sites."
SFist: the same article inspires SFist's Rita to express mock admiration for theChron's cutting edge awareness: "The Chron, fresh from learning that "'blog' is short for 'Web-log,'" (UPDATE 3/11/2005: Rogers shows that a lot of papers are still explaining this term.)
Borrowed Pen:
Local book and music Dewey agrees this world class city is worthy of a
world class paper, which theChron is not. (He also suggested I
criticize the paper in AP Style, because "Otherwise it reads like the
equivalent of a fat person telling Barry Bonds to get in shape." I
picked up a manual - thanks for the tip, Dewey!)
Chris Nolan: Here's a sad statistic. The other day Nolan was mentioned in a front page article, but sfgate sent her only 70 visitors. A mention in Craigslist Craig's blog brought her 85 in 24 hours. A link from Instapundit would get her ten times that amount.
theChron's own Jon Carroll:
"There were visionaries who thought that a pairing between newspapers
and Web sites -- even, gasp, giving away content for free online --
would be a good idea. They were referred to the 'let's build a colony
on Mars' department."
If the Chron had been smart, they would have had Jon blogging years ago.
I usually get to Chris Nolan's site from craig's. If craig put a link to her
blog on on a main section of CL, it would get far more traffic.
I should have tried to talk to Phil Bronstein after he spoke at the Hunter S. Thompson event, but I think he was gone by the time of the intermission.
It might be interesting to see if he and some others at the Chron and the Gate would get together with some bloggers to discuss how the paper could suck less. As you say, there are good stories, but the bay area should have a better paper (actually better media from alt weeklies to tv news).
Posted by: Steve Rhodes | March 11, 2005 at 03:24 AM