By David L. Grey
Media Watch
Add the San Francisco Chronicle to the bigger Bay Area media players who have recently redesigned themselves.
Our metropolitan newspapers, especially, have been making major changes over the past three months:
The San Jose Mercury News, closing its short-lived San Francisco edition and merging its City coverage with the existing but revamped Peninsula edition, continuing to be headquartered in Palo Alto.
On top of high profile publisher changes and corporate cutbacks during economic hard times, the Mercury News also cutting staffs and other bureaus, if reluctantly at first on the news sides. And changing how the paper is organized day to day and appears, including even narrower page widths.
The San Francisco Examiner still trying to find its new identities and niches as basically an independent, non-Hearst Corporation-owned morning paper.
The San Francisco Chronicle, now owned by Hearst, attempting to be “”more serious” in appearance and content (according, at least, to its editors and recent promotions) after perhaps even a century of being perceived as “that wild newspaper of the West.”
Then there’s Metro Newspapers, Silicon Valley’s alternative weeklies, separating six of its small South Bay community newspapers from its “primary parent” Metro (still based in San Jose).
Toss in-but don’t toss away-KNTV of San Jose (Channel 11) ever closer to taking over NBC broadcast rights from KRON of San Francisco (Channel 4) on January 1, and this has already become a year of major area media transitions.
Not excluding, of course or especially, the many high tech/dot.com new media and information sources in Silicon Valley which have risen, leveled off or fallen.
If one needs confirmation of the economic and ethical complexities in this, check out one of the most followed weekday media insider sources: Jim Romenesko’s online MediaNews.
Among the dozens of individual and organizational resources listed and linked via the www.poynter.org Web site, MediaNews best captures the nonstop developments and controversies surrounding the high volume, wide ranges and remarkable rapidity of media changes across the country.
If one prefers a slower pace and more lasting overview, there is the very new and contemporary book, “The Elements of Journalism,” by press overseers Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.
It is rightly subtitled “What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect” and is a “must read” for anyone trying to figure out how the news media got to today, where it seems headed and probably should be. It could as well be subtitled for many of us: “What Is Journalism For?”
These online and hardcover resources, alone, could supplant most media critics and our commentaries these days and for years.
David L. Grey, Ph.D., of Mountain View, is professor emeritus of journalism at San Jose State University, where he taught and researched media law and ethics. He can be reached at: greyline@pacbell.net .
