Chronicle Entering Ambitious Hearst Era

The Hearst Corp. took two major steps to end a fierce 100-year newspaper rivalry and launch what it promises will be a world-class newspaper Thursday night. It named a new publisher and top editing team for the Chronicle, which it will begin publishing Wednesday, and it released a report exonerating its current newspaper, the Examiner, of charges that had undermined its editorial integrity.

The report was the result of an investigation by former federal Judge Charles Renfrew. Hearst executives requested it after controversial testimony by Timothy White, then publisher of the Examiner, during an antitrust trial that sought to block Hearst’s purchase of the Chronicle.

White testified that he engaged in a bit of horse trading while talking with Mayor Willie Brown, offering him “more favorable treatment” on the Examiner’s editorial page if he would support the purchase.

White later said he was tired and confused when he testified and did not mean to suggest that the paper would compromise its coverage. Nevertheless he was suspended as publisher and the newsrooms of the Chronicle and Examiner were embroiled in controversy.

Renfrew’s report, based on interviews with White and 32 others and an examination of 1,677 Examiner articles, concluded that the Examiner “did not at any time or in any way compromise its coverage of the mayor--either in its news or editorial pages.”

Because of the turmoil engendered by White’s testimony, Hearst felt compelled to delay moving forward with publication of the Chronicle.

When the new Chronicle debuts under Hearst ownership next Wednesday, it will be led by publisher John Oppedahl, who began his journalism career as a reporter for the Examiner in 1967 and was most recently publisher of the Arizona Republic.

He will be assisted by several longtime Chronicle and Examiner news executives, among them Matthew Wilson, executive editor of the old Chronicle, who will become executive vice president for news and associate publisher; Phil Bronstein, executive editor of the Examiner, who will become senior vice president and executive editor of the Chronicle; and Jerry Roberts, managing editor of the old Chronicle, who will retain that title in the new paper and also become a vice president.

Although publishers virtually always select their top editors, Oppedahl said Thursday night that he had yet to speak with Wilson, Bronstein or Roberts because of restrictions imposed by Hearst’s sale of the Examiner to the Fang family.

“It was clear that the leaders of the corporation liked and admired Matt, Phil and Jerry and wanted to find a structure that would encourage them to stay,” Oppedahl said.

Wilson, Bronstein and Roberts, speaking to the newsrooms of the two papers after the official announcement Thursday night, all pledged to produce a great paper and urged their staffs to “let go of our long-standing rivalries,” as Wilson put it.

“It won’t be easy, but it is necessary,” he said.

The Chronicle and the Examiner have been partners in a joint operating agreement since 1965, sharing business operations and joint revenues 50-50.

Fang Family to Publish Examiner

On the same day that Hearst publishes the new Chronicle, in yet another twist worthy of Shakespeare or Sophocles, the Examiner--which a century ago repeatedly warned readers of the “yellow peril” and insisted that the exclusion of Chinese immigrants was an unalterable demand--will begin publication under its new owners, the Fangs, a family of Chinese immigrants.

Ted Fang, 37, editor and publisher of what is being called the “new” Examiner, says his paper will be strictly local, “a second voice for the people of San Francisco.” He promises strong community coverage by a staff that reflects the city’s broad diversity.

But the Fangs’ primary journalistic credentials are ownership of free newspapers including the thrice-weekly San Francisco Independent, which regularly uses its news columns to promote (or attack) the political causes and candidates its proprietors feel most strongly about.

That record has led many in the Bay Area to worry that the paper will be little more than a short-lived journalistic attack dog, kept afloat by the $66-million subsidy Hearst agreed to pay the Fangs over the next three years in order to obtain Justice Department approval of its purchase of the Chronicle.

The Hearst Corp. also has its critics. None of the 12 papers it owns--including the Houston Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer--has ever been regarded as among the nation’s best.

Despite their past, Hearst executives say they have big ambitions for the Chronicle.

The Chronicle, heretofore perhaps best known for publishing the late columnist Herb Caen and for conducting a citywide, Page 1 search for a decent cup of coffee, will become a great newspaper, they say--a world-class newspaper, the kind of newspaper San Franciscans have long thought they deserve but have never had.

Certainly, the opportunity is now there. The Chronicle has a new, visionary publisher, a dominant competitive position, freedom from a 35-year profit-sharing agreement with the money-losing Examiner and the experience and resources of the Hearst Corp., an international media conglomerate that had $2.4 billion in sales last year and that, in addition to its newspapers, publishes 16 U.S. magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping.

The Chronicle will also have virtually the entire 200-member news and editorial staff of the “old” Examiner, which has been added to the Chronicle’s existing staff of 360. The terms of the Chronicle sale promised all Examiner staff members jobs with the Chronicle.

That gives the Chronicle the second-largest newsroom contingent on the West Coast, after the 1,100-member news and editorial team at the Los Angeles Times.

“This is the moment of moments,” said Orville Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley.

But for Hearst to truly take advantage of that moment would be a notable change, not only for the corporation, but for the history of San Francisco journalism.

This magical, mythical city by the Bay--one of the most sophisticated, best-educated in the country, where such cutting-edge magazines as Ramparts and Rolling Stone were born and where the Internet communications revolution has spawned online pioneers Salon.com, Wired.com and Redherring.com--has never had newspapers whose quality even remotely approached the aspirations of its populace.

“Why is this literate city . . . saddled with the most mediocre daily journalism in the country?” a writer in Salon.com asked last summer, echoing a question that has long been batted around the Bay.

“For decades, San Francisco’s failure to produce a daily paper on the level of the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe or even (the horror!) the San Jose Mercury News has been a source of deep local shame,” the article said.

The Chronicle is better than its reputation. But most San Francisco media observers think Hearst’s Examiner was, even at the end, more aggressive than the larger Chronicle in its coverage of City Hall, among other areas. And both papers have tended to rely more on wire service copy than original enterprise reporting. Neither has ever had the staff, editorial budget or news bureaus of the nation’s best papers.

Surrounded by Competitors

To complicate matters, the paper faces an intense competitive situation against the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to the north, the Contra Costa Times and Alameda Newspaper Group to the east and, especially, the San Jose Mercury-News to the south.

The Mercury-News--like the Contra Costa Times--is owned by Knight Ridder Corp., and it has been growing in stature and size in recent years. It is widely regarded as providing the best coverage of any daily newspaper of Silicon Valley and the dot.com revolution. In July, the Mercury-News began publishing a San Francisco edition that now sells about 4,000 copies a day, publisher Jay Harris said.

Oppedahl’s experience in the competitive environments of Detroit and Dallas is likely to be useful as he gears up the Chronicle for that battle. He also has previously supervised the merger of the newsroom staffs of the Republic and its sister paper, the Phoenix Gazette.

The new publisher is known in the industry as an innovator and risk-taker, someone who was an early advocate of the Internet and the need to forge cooperation across the wall that traditionally separated the news and business operations at most good newspapers.

In 1997, using research that showed Saturday was the day when people worry about their ‘cocoons”--their houses and gardens, their families and their futures--he shifted primary coverage of personal finance and gardening to the Saturday paper, thus turning the Republic’s Saturday editions from the week’s worst financial performer--as Saturday papers are at many newspapers--into the week’s second-most profitable.

In the summer of 1999, he also started a beach edition of the Republic in San Diego, where many people from Arizona go on vacation.

As a publisher, Oppedahl is not without his critics. In Phoenix, some present and former Republic reporters say, the paper’s attempts to leverage the news to maximize profits made it reluctant to cover major advertisers aggressively. Oppedahl denied those charges.

However strong his credentials, however, Oppedahl would have had little chance of becoming publisher of the Chronicle, were it not for White’s testimony in the antitrust case. A man generally liked and respected in San Francisco, White was originally thought to have the inside track to the publisher’s office at the new, Hearst-owned Chronicle.

With Renfrew’s report, Hearst managers can hope that the furor surrounding White’s testimony will become just one more chapter in a long and colorful history for the San Francisco newspapers.

The colorful characters and unusual behavior date back to the de Young brothers, Charles and Michael. Teenagers when they founded the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle in 1865, they determined to have fun and turn a profit on their sole operating capital--a $20 gold piece they borrowed from their landlord.

Fourteen years later--having published Mark Twain and Bret Harte, having scooped the local competition on the assassination of President Lincoln and having steadily supplemented theater news with political coverage--the renamed San Francisco Morning Chronicle published scathing exposes on mayoral candidate Isaac Kalloch, who then castigated the de Youngs . . . whereupon Charles de Young, grievously offended, shot Kalloch.

Kalloch survived. Three months later, he was elected mayor. Five months after that, in April 1880, his son Milton shot and killed de Young.

Fast forward from the 1880s to the 1990s. Bronstein becomes executive editor of the Examiner. He marries movie star Sharon Stone (in a ceremony that makes the cover of People magazine), wrestles an alligator in a city park (after donning scuba gear) and breaks the ankle of a prominent political consultant who had come to the paper to complain about the paper’s coverage of City Hall.

Like most large cities, San Francisco once had several rival daily newspapers. But the mid- to late-20th-century phenomenon of mergers and closings that eliminated competing dailies in all but a handful of cities struck here, too, and in the 1950s, three of those papers became one--the Hearst-owned News-Call Bulletin.

In 1965, Hearst and the owners of the Chronicle entered into a joint operating agreement. Under terms of that agreement, the News-Call Bulletin would close, and the Chronicle and the Examiner would maintain independent and competing news operations, but would share business and printing operations--and the combined profits of the entire enterprise.

The agreement left the Chronicle with a virtual monopoly in the morning and consigned the Examiner to the afternoon, where metropolitan newspapers had once flourished but where changing lifestyles and competition from evening television news had forced many papers into bankruptcy.

The deal amounted to artificial life support, a 35-year subsidy for the much smaller Examiner, which saw its circulation and advertising gradually decline but which actually had profits estimated at $16 million to $18 million more than the Chronicle last year, according to records submitted in an antitrust trial this year.

The major reason for this was that the Examiner’s editorial budget was $16.2 million, while the Chronicle’s--which has increased in recent years--was more than $30 million.

The Chronicle hasn’t always been the dominant paper in San Francisco. Indeed, the Examiner was No. 1 in circulation for many years.

In 1952, Chronicle publisher Charles de Young Theiriot, grandson of one of the paper’s founders, named Scott Newhall editor and charged him with reinvigorating the paper--and its bottom line--setting the stage for a massive circulation war.

Newhall likened a newspaper to a circus and behaved accordingly. Get the people into the tent any way you can, he said, and then they’ll see we have a good show for them.

He campaigned to have “naked animals” clothed, grumbled about the city’s bad coffee and published so many columnists that it often seemed the paper had little room for news.

But the columnists--Arthur Hoppe, Stanton Delaplane, Charles McCabe and Pauline Phillips, who titled her column “Dear Abby”--were popular and readers flocked to the paper.

Circulation Surged in 1960s

In 1958, Caen, who had been a Chronicle columnist and then defected to the Examiner, returned, too. He spent the next 39 years turning out his unique brand of gossip, poetry, news and commentary.

Chronicle circulation, which had dipped to 152,672 in 1951, almost doubled, to 300,000, in 1961 and hit 363,322--about 60,000 more than the Examiner--in 1965, the year the joint operating agreement was signed.

Much like the agreement Hearst negotiated with the Chandlers in Los Angeles three years earlier, when Hearst folded its Herald-Express and the Chandlers folded their Mirror-News, this deal left Hearst with the declining afternoon market, while giving the opposition a lucrative morning monopoly.

It was a sad comedown for the once-powerful Examiner, a Hearst paper since the day in October 1880 when George Hearst acquired it. He turned it over to his son on March 7, 1887.

His son, then 23, was William Randolph Hearst Sr.--whose life would later be memorialized in the film classic “Citizen Kane”--and he transformed the Examiner into the launching pad for a nationwide media empire that featured sensational headlines and promotional gimmicks that ranged from marrying young lovers in hot-air balloons above the Bay to whipping up public frenzy for the Spanish-American War.

Within a week after taking over the paper in 1887, William Randolph Hearst Sr. had its front page redesigned to include the words “Monarch of the Dailies” and “The Largest, Brightest and Best Newspaper on the Pacific Coast.

Now, 113 years later, Hearst’s descendants own the Chronicle, and they say their ambitions are even grander.