Even amid affluence of tech capital, local news struggles in the Bay Area
In this July 5, 2019, photo, an East Bay Times newspaper sits in the bottom row of empty news racks in the Financial District in San Francisco. Ownership changes and consolidations have left the region known as the East Bay with just a single daily newspaper. The East Bay Times, based in Walnut Creek, attempts to cover a region nearly the size of Delaware with a fraction of the staff of the former dailies.
The former small business owner started his political career on the Concord City Council nearly three decades ago, where he recalls seeing at least one reporter in the front row of every meeting. DeSaulnier is so concerned about the state of local news that he has backed legislative action in Congress to support it.
“Where does one go for local coverage, high school sports? What’s going on with the city and the politics, and what’s happening around the community?” he said. “How can I be part of my community if I don’t know what’s going on?”Former journalists, civic leaders and others in the East Bay lament the loss of the community coverage that was once the staple of local dailies, many of which competed for scoops in towns where coverage areas overlapped.
The city’s largest employer, Chevron Corp., runs the other through a public relations firm. The Richmond Standard posts stories about crime, high school football and community events. It also provides “a voice for Chevron Products Company on civic issues.” Its reporters scoured the city’s neighborhoods and institutions, and they filled the front page with Oakland-based stories, said Reynolds, who started as an intern and became editor in 2008. They also tried out new ideas in the digital age, such as blogging about life inside one of the city’s most dangerous zip codes.
Digital First has a record of consolidating newspapers and trimming staff, but it also has said that its business model keeps local journalism alive. The company staffs reporters throughout the region and has separate regional sections on the East Bay Times' website. “Our business — the business of news — continues to be distressed, and we’re doing our level best to stabilize that business and make it sustainable into the future," Pine said.The loss of so many daily news outlets in this relatively well-to-do region has a ring of irony: Much of the East Bay’s wealth and growth is due to tech giants — Apple, Facebook and Google — whose headquarters are a mere bridge crossing away on the other side of San Francisco Bay.
“The fact of the matter is that both Google and Facebook control everything about the news experience, and yet they don’t want to compensate the people who create that content,” he said. “It’s not about providing artificial props to models that frankly are no longer valid,” said Richard Gingras, vice president of news for Google. “It’s not a healthy thing if you're dependent on other sources for revenue to allow you to do your journalistic work.”
Each has pledged $300 million to boost journalism across the country, much of that at the local level where newsrooms have suffered the most; a University of North Carolina study found that more than 2,000 weekly and daily papers have closed in the U.S. during the last 15 years. The program has helped several news outlets in the San Francisco Bay area, including a hyper-local website in Berkeley that used what it learned last year — along with grant money from Facebook — to sign up 343 members during its year-end membership drive. The previous year had seen just 23 new members during the same period.
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