Final edition:
Twilight of the American newspaper
By Richard Rodriguez
Richard Rodriguez is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco. His most recent essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The God of the Desert,” appeared in the January 2008 issue.
A
scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin
shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to
read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune
in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an
eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera!
Women in Chicago
went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher
imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.
Several
generations of children learned to read from that text. The schoolroom
had a wind-up phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glory, and one
record, from which a distant female voice sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of
Life.”
Is
it better to have or to want? My friend says her teacher knew one great
thing: There was something out there. She told her class she did not
expect to see even a fraction of what the world had to offer. But she
hoped they might.
I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school and lived ninety miles inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from school, twenty-five cents bought me a connection with a gray maritime city at odds with the postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen,
whose column I read immediately—second section, corner left—invited me
into the provincial cosmopolitanism that characterized the city’s
outward regard: “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”
Newspapers
have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in
chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and
executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands
of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, once the Chronicle’s archrival. The Hearst Corporation has its headquarters in New York City. According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been losing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco there have been buyouts and firings of truck drivers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle has taken to publishing letters from readers who remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of the San Francisco Chronicle.
When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle
is near death—and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th
anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature
articles on fog?—it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.
Most newspapers that are dying today were born in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post–Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann Arbor News
died 2009, born 1835. It was the pride and the function of the American
newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation
of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated
enough to have news. Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of
the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new
country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were
the Gutenberg Nation.
Nineteenth-century
newspapers draped bunting about their mastheads and brandished an
inflated diction and a Gothic type to name themselves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tribune, the Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage of time, the name of the city was commonly attached to the name of the newspaper, not only to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the New York Gazette but because the paper described the city and the city described the paper.
The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to the San Francisco Chronicle,
was founded in 1865 by two teenage brothers on a borrowed twenty-dollar
gold piece. Charles and Michael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus,
was initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with
their widowed mother from St. Louis. In California,
the brothers invented themselves as descendants of French aristocracy.
They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men.
Karl
Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was “thickly populated by men of
all races, from the Yankee to the Chinese, from the Negro to the Indian
and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European.” Oscar Wilde
seconded Karl Marx: “It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is
said to be in San Francisco.” What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville’s Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen?
There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There
were Australian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts—“Sydney
Ducks”—prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath
the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Historians relish the
old young city’s foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fleas, mud,
and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers
moved about in. One was “vigilante,” from the Spanish. The other was
“hoodlum”—a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threatening especially to the Chinese.
The de Young brothers named their newspaper the Daily Dramatic Chronicle
because stranded young men seek entertainment. The city very early
developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red
light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there
were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and reading rooms. San Francisco
desperately appreciated minstrel shows and circuses and melodeons and
Shakespeare. Stages were set up in gambling halls and saloons where
Shakespearean actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, pointed to a
ghost rising at the back of the house: Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again.
An Italian who came to San Francisco
to study medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a forty-niner, in
early light, when he slept and then woke in an old house out by the
ocean. The forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with a power of
sadness about him. He did not speak. He had red hair and wore a dark
shirt.
We
can imagine marooned opera singers, not of the second, perhaps not even
of the third rank, enunciating elaborate prayers and curses from the
Italian repertoire as they stumbled among the pebbles and stones of cold
running creeks on their way to perform in Gold Rush towns along the American River. It was as though the grandiose nineteenth-century musical form sought its natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Nevada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed the circuit and took David Belasco’s melodrama of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla del West.)
In 1860, San Francisco
had a population of 57,000. By 1870, the population had almost tripled,
to 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morning Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their early twenties. Along with theatrical and operatic listings, the Chronicle
then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the
dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and
saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary
number of suicides, likewise fires, for San Francisco was a wooden city,
as it still is in many of its districts.
It
is still possible, very occasionally, to visit the Gold Rush city when
one attends a crowded theater. Audiences here, more than in any city I
know, possess a wit in common and can react as one—in pleasure, but also
in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be
related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being “an oasis of
civilization in the California desert,” in the phrase of Addison DeWitt
(in All About Eve), who,
though a Hollywood figment, is about as good a rendition as I can
summon of the sensibility (“New York critics”) we have courted here for
one hundred and fifty years. And deplored.
The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded by vacancy—to the west, the gray court of the Pacific; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada
range. Shipping and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, but
they were never the consolations the city sought. The city looked,
rather, to Addison DeWitt—to the eastern United States, to Europe,
for approbation. If there was a pathetic sense of insecurity in living
at the edge of the continent—San Francisco proclaiming itself “the Paris
of the Pacific”!—the city also raised men of visionary self-interest
who squinted into the distance and conceived of opening trade to Asia or
cutting down redwood forests or laying track across a sea of yellow
grass.
Readers
in other parts of the country were fascinated by any scrap of detail
about the Gold Rush city. Here is a fragment (July 9, 1866) from Bret
Harte’s dispatch to readers of the Springfield Republican (from a collection of such dispatches edited by Gary Scharnhorst). The description remains accurate:
Midsummer!
. . . To dwellers in Atlantic cities, what visions of heated pavements,
of staring bricks, of grateful shade trees, of straw hats and white
muslin, are conjured up in this word. . . . In San Francisco
it means equal proportions of fog and wind. On the evening of the
Fourth of July it was a pleasant and instructive sight to observe the
population, in great-coats and thick shawls, warming themselves by
bonfires, watching the sky-rockets lose themselves in the thick fog, and
returning soberly home to their firesides and warm blankets.
From its inception, the San Francisco Chronicle borrowed a tone of merriment and swagger from the city it daily invented—on one occasion with fatal consequences: in 1879, the Chronicle
ran an exposé of the Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, a recent arrival to
the city (“driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper”) who had put
himself up as a candidate for mayor. The Chronicle recounted Kalloch’s trial for adultery in Massachusetts (“his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple
choristers”). Kalloch responded by denouncing the “bawdy house
breeding” of the de Young boys, implying that Charles and Michael’s
mother kept a whorehouse in St. Louis.
Charles rose immediately to his mother’s defense; he shot Kalloch, who
recovered and won City Hall. De Young never served jail time. A year
later, in 1880, Kalloch’s son shot and killed Charles de Young in the
offices of the Chronicle.
“Hatred
of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman,” Ambrose Bierce
later remarked of Michael, the surviving brother. However just or unjust
Bierce’s estimation, the de Young brothers lived and died according to
their notion of a newspaper’s purpose—that it should entertain and
incite the population.
In
1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival
newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels,
after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause.
When he died in 1925, Michael de Young bequeathed the ownership of the Chronicle
to his four daughters with the stipulation that it could not be sold
out of the family until the death of the last surviving daughter.
San Francisco
gentility has roots as shallow and as belligerent as those of the
Australian blue gum trees that were planted heedlessly throughout the
city and now configure and scent our Sunday walks. In 1961, Holiday magazine came to town to devote an entire issue to San Francisco.
The three living daughters of Michael de Young were photographed seated
on an antique high-backed causeuse in the gallery of the old M. H. de
Young Memorial Museum their father had donated to the city to house his
collection of paintings and curiosities (including a scabrous old mummy
beloved of generations of schoolchildren—now considered too gauche to be
displayed). For the same issue, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, widow of
Adolph, was photographed taking tea in her Pacific Heights
mansion in what looks to be a fur-trimmed, floor-length velvet gown.
The Spreckels family donated to the city a replica of the Palais de la
Legion d’Honneur in Paris
to house a collection of European paintings and rooms and furniture.
One Spreckels and three de Youngs make four Margaret Dumonts—a San Francisco royal flush.
In
1972, the museum donated by Michael de Young merged with the museum
created by the family of the man who tried to murder Michael de Young to
become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Men,
usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the
nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a
newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego. Newspaper publishers were
accustomed to lord over cities.
William Randolph Hearst was given the San Francisco Examiner by his father, a mining millionaire and U.S.
senator, who may or may not have won it in a poker game in 1880. As it
happened, young Hearst was born to run a newspaper. He turned the Examiner into the largest-circulation paper in San Francisco before he moved on to New York, where, in 1895, he acquired the New York Journal. Hearst quickly engaged in a yellow-journalism rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both Hearst and Pulitzer assumed political careers. Hearst served in the Congress of the United States—served is not quite the word—as did Pulitzer, briefly.
We
remember Joseph Pulitzer not as a sensationalist journalist but as the
philanthropist who endowed an award for excellence in journalism and the
arts. We remember William Randolph Hearst because his castle
overlooking the Pacific—fifty miles of ocean frontage—is as forthright a
temple to grandiosity as this nation can boast. And we remember Hearst
as the original for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles portrayed
Charles Foster Kane with the mix of populism and egomania audiences of
the time easily recognized as Hearst. Kane the champion of the common
man becomes Kane the autocrat. Kane builds an opera house for his
paramour. Kane invents a war.
The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner
were both losing money when, in 1965, Charles Thieriot, grandson of
Michael de Young, met with William Randolph Hearst Jr. to collaborate on
what they called the San Francisco Newspaper Agency. The Agency was a
third entity designed to share production and administrative costs. The
papers were to maintain editorial discretion and separate staffs. In
addition, an incoherent Sunday edition shuffled together sections from
both the Chronicle and the Examiner.
The terms of the publishers’ agreement eventually favored the afternoon
Hearst newspaper, for it was soon to fall behind, to become the lesser
newspaper in a two-paper town. The Examiner nevertheless continued to collect half the profits of both.
In January 1988, Phyllis Tucker, the last surviving daughter of Michael de Young, died in San Francisco.
Tucker’s daughter, Nan Tucker McEvoy, managed to forestall the sale of
the paper for several years. But in 1999, the founding publisher’s
posthumous grip was pried loose by a majority vote of family members to
sell. At that time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of reclaiming
the San Francisco market. Hearst paid $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San Francisco Chronicle.
To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department, the Hearst Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco Examiner to the politically connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek,
the oldest and largest English-language Asian-American newspaper. The
Hearst Corporation paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the Examiner.
Florence Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor’s chair. Within a
year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang threatened to sue his
mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur from Colorado
who deflated William Randolph Hearst’s “Monarch of the Dailies” to a
freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the street
twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco municipal buses.
The day after I was born in San Francisco,
my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were
barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun “newspaper” is
something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American
newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record—papers were
daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A
newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city.
Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements.
They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They
published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco,
where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable—fog
clearing by noon). They published the fire department’s log and high
school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco,
there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of
this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane
progress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fishwrap,” as Herb Caen
often called it.
Unwilling to forfeit any fraction of my quarter, I even studied the classifieds—-unrelieved columns laid out like city blocks: Room for rent. Marina. No pets. File clerk position. Heavy phones. Ticket agent for busy downtown box office. Must be bonded. Norman, we’re still here. Only once did I find the titillation I was looking for, a listing worthy of a barbershop magazine, an Argosy,
or a Mickey Spillane: “Ex-Green Beret will do anything legal for cash.”
Newspapers were sustained by classifieds, as well as by
department-store ads and automobile ads. I admired the urbanity of the
drawings of newspaper ads in those years, and I took from them a
conception of the posture of downtown San Francisco. Despite glimpses into the classified life of the city, despite the hauteur of ad-art mannerism, the Chronicle
offered some assurance (to an adolescent such as I was) it would have
been difficult for me to describe. I will call it now an implied
continuity. There was continuity in the comics and on the sports page,
but nowhere more than in the columns.
During Scott Newhall’s tenure as executive editor, from 1952 to 1971, the Chronicle achieved something of a golden age. Newhall was flamboyant in ways that were congenial to the city. At a time when the Los Angeles Times
was attracting admiration from the East Coast for its fleet of foreign
bureaus, Newhall reverted to an eighteenth-century model of a newspaper
as first-person observer.
For nearly two decades the city that prized its singularity was entertained by idiosyncratic voices. At the shallow end of the Chronicle’s
roster (under the cipher of a coronet) appeared Count Marco, a Liberace
of the typewriter who concerned himself with fashion and beauty and l’amour. At the deep end—a snug corner at Gino and Carlo’s bar in North Beach—sat
“Charles McCabe, Esq.,” an erudite connoisseur of books, spirits, and
failed marriages. Terrence O’Flaherty watched television. Stanton
Delaplane, to my mind the best writer among them, wrote “Postcard”—a
travel series with charm and humor. Art Hoppe concocted political
satire. Harold Gilliam expounded on wind and tide and fog. Alfred
Frankenstein was an art critic of international reputation. There was a
book column by William Hogan and a society column by Frances Moffat.
Allan Temko wrote architectural criticism against the grain of the
city’s sensibility, a sensibility he sometimes characterized as a
liberal spirit at odds with a timorous aesthetic. All the Chronicle columnists and critics had constituents, but the name above the banner was Herb Caen.
Herb Caen began writing a column for the Chronicle before the Second World War. At that time, Caen was in his twenties and probably resembled the fresh, fast-talking smarty-pants he pitched his voice to portray in print. Item. . .item. . .who’s gotta item? In 1950, he was lured over to the Examiner
at a considerable hike in salary, and circulation followed at his
heels. He knew all the places; he knew the maître d’s, the bartenders,
the bouncers, the flower-sellers, the cops, the madams, the
shopkeepers—knew them in the sense that they all knew him and knew he
could be dangerous. In 1958, Caen returned to the Chronicle, and, again, circulation tilted.
Each day except Saturday, for forty years, Caen set the conversation for San Francisco.
Who was in town. Who was in the hospital and would appreciate a card.
Who was seen drinking champagne out of a rent boy’s tennis shoe. His
last column began: “And how was your Christmas?” He persuaded hundreds
of thousands of readers (crowded on buses, on the way to work) that his
was the city we lived in. Monday through Friday, Caen
was an omniscient table-hopping bitch. On Sunday, he dropped all that;
he reverted to an ingenue—a sailor on leave, a sentimental flaneur
infatuated with his dream “Baghdad-by-the-Bay.” The point of the Sunday
perambulation was simple relish—fog clearing by noon; evidence that the
mystical, witty, sourdough city had survived one more week.
After a time, Caen stopped writing Sunday panegyrics; he said it was not the same city anymore, and it wasn’t. He wasn’t. Los Angeles,
even San Jose—two cities created by suburbanization—had become more
influential in the world than the “cool grey city of love,” a George
Sterling line Caen favored. The Chinese city did not figure in Caen’s
novel, except atmospherically—lanterns and dragons, chorus girls at the
Forbidden City, Danny Kaye taking over the kitchen at Kan’s, that sort of thing. The growing Filipino, Latin-American city did not figure at all.
In Caen’s heyday, the San Francisco Chronicle
reflected the self-infatuated city. But it was not the city entire that
drew the world’s attention. In the 1950s, the version of San Francisco
that interested the world was Jack Kerouac’s parish—a few North Beach
coffeehouses habituated by beatniks (a word Caen coined) and City Lights
Bookstore. By the time I was a teenager, the path to City Lights was
electrified by the marquees of topless clubs and bad wolves with
flashlights beckoning passersby toward red velvet curtains. Anyway, the
scene had moved by that time to the fog-shrouded Grateful Dead concerts
in Golden Gate Park and to the Haight Ashbury. A decade later, the most famous neighborhood in the city was the homosexual Castro District. San Francisco never seemed to grow old the way other cities grow old.
In 1967, the Chronicle’s rock and jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason, teamed up with a renegade cherub named Jann Wenner to publish Rolling Stone
magazine. What this disparate twosome intuited was that by chronicling
the rising influence of rock music, they were effectively covering a
revolution. In New York,
writers were cultivating, in the manner of Thackeray, a
self-referential point of view and calling it the “New Journalism.” In San Francisco, Rolling Stone
was publishing a gospel “I” that found itself in a world without
precedent: Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith, Timothy Ferris,
Hunter S. Thompson. I remember sitting in an Indian tea shop in South
London in 1970 (in the manner of the New Journalism) and being gripped
by envy potent enough to be called homesickness as I read John Burks’s
account of the Stones concert at Altamont. It was like reading a dispatch from the Gold Rush city.
One morning in the 1970s, the Chronicle began to publish Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City—adding
sex and drugs and local branding to the nineteenth-century gimmick of
serial fiction. At a time when American families were trending to the
suburbs, Maupin’s novel insisted that San Francisco
was still magnetic for single lives. In those same years, Cyra McFadden
was writing satirically about the sexual eccentricities of suburban Marin County in a series (“The Serial”) for an alternative newspaper called the Pacific Sun.
In those same years, Joan Didion wrote, in The White Album, that for many people in Los Angeles “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the (Manson family) murders on Cielo Drive
traveled like brushfire through the community.” To borrow for a moment
the oracular deadpan: In San Francisco, the Sixties came to an end for
many people in 1977, when Jann Wenner packed up and moved Rolling Stone to New York. As he departed, the moss-covered wunderkind griped to a young reporter standing by that San Francisco was a “provincial backwater.”
What
no one could have imagined in 1977, not even Jann Wenner, was that a
suburban industrial region thirty miles to the south of the city
contained an epic lode. Silicon Valley would, within twenty years, become the capital of Nowhere. What no one could have imagined in 1977 was that San Francisco would become a bedroom community for a suburban industrial region that lay thirty miles to the south.
Don’t kid a kidder. Herb Caen died in 1997. With the loss of that daily hectoring voice, the Chronicle seemed to lose its narrative thread, as did the city. The Chronicle began to reprint Caen columns, to the bewilderment of anyone younger than thirty.
If you die in San Francisco,
unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is
unlikely you will be judged notable unless your obituary has already
appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, there will be no public notice taken at all. As much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline.
In
the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and
observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the
newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the
strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose,
it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco,
not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of
his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the
responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of
why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation;
three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps
the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.
We
no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper.
Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the
decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology
or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably
as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill.
We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine
changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford
because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate
our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because
technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that
case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.
A
few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so
plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she
stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus.
In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t even notice.”
The
other day I came upon a coffeehouse that resembled, as I judged from
its nineteenth-century exterior, the sort of café where the de Young
brothers might have distributed their paper. The café was only a couple
of blocks from the lively gay ambience of upper Market Street yet far removed from the clamorous San Francisco
of the nineteenth century. Several men and women sat alone at separate
tables. No one spoke. The café advertised free wi-fi; all but one of the
customers had laptops open before them. (The exception was playing
solitaire with a real deck of cards.) The only sounds were the hissing
of an espresso machine and the clattering of a few saucers. A man in his
forties, sitting by the door, stared at a screen upon which a cartoon
animal, perhaps a dog, loped silently.
I should mention that the café, like every coffeehouse in the city, had stacks of the Bay Guardian, S.F. Weekly, the Bay Area Reporter—free and roughly equivalent to the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of yore. I should mention that San Francisco has always been a city of stranded youth, and the city apparently continues to provide entertainments for youth:
Gosta Berling, Kid Mud, Skeletal System El Rio. 8pm, $5. Davis Jones, Eric Andersen and Tyler Stafford, Melissa McClelland Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7. Ben Kweller, Jones Street Station, Princeton Slim’s. 8:30pm, $19. Harvey Mandel and the Snake Crew Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16. Queers, Mansfields, Hot Toddies, Atom Age Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.
The
colleague I am meeting for coffee tells me (occasioned by my puzzlement
at the wi-fi séance) that more and more often he is finding sex on
Craigslist. As you know better than I do, one goes to Craigslist to sell
or to buy an old couch or a concert ticket or to look for a job. But
also to arrange for sexual Lego with a body as free of narrative as
possible. (Im bored 26-Oakland-east.)
Another
friend, a journalist born in India, who has heard me connect newspapers
with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, but neither is
he troubled by it: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read
these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in
bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India,
from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all
hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a
place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”
So
what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities
are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chicago, women go to the opera with bare shoulders.
Something
funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what
futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists
and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want
exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight,
disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle
tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You
can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go
shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the
pages of their New York Times
all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in
Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New
Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair;
they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in
London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want
five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the
park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug
up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a
way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it.
We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C.,
where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between
“conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We
will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins
or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of
intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without
professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it
might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon
reader responses (Moby Dick
is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J.
Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without
obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia
entry.
National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today,
which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your
doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the
airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another.
We end up where we started.
An obituary does not propose a solution.
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