There was a time when the battle for circulation and advertising in big American cities was waged between competing daily newspapers. When monopoly daily newspapers were created in many of those cities, there was a mistaken assumption that the competition for readers and ads was over. But, in fact, the competition has become greater than ever.
The new kind of competition is between combined daily newspaper operations and independent weeklies and monthlies that are fighting each other as well as the dailies. It is that cutthroat competition which underlies the attempt to limit street newsracks, a tactic being met by weekly and monthly publishers with threats to initiate multi-million-dollar lawsuits based on antitrust law and First Amendment rights.
As the story has appeared in the mass media to date, limiting street newsracks is an effort by municipal government to clean up an esthetically unpleasing proliferation of racks used by a wide variety of periodicals, ranging in frequency of publication from daily to monthly. In fact, the attempt to limit newsracks is an effort by the biggest newspapers, through cooperating politicians, to squelch the enormous amount of competition cutting into their readership, advertising, and socio-political power.
Not only revenue, but also the ability to control elections and municipal policy, is at stake.
The publishing war in San Francisco serves as an exaggerated example, because in some aspects the explosion of periodicals there is unique. A somewhat different newsrack war has been fought in Chicago (see "Chicago Newspapers Sue").
Once the home of half a dozen daily newspapers, San Francisco now is left with a monopoly. There are two dailies, the Chronicle and the Examiner, but they do not compete with each other. Instead, they are merged together into the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, and operation wherein the Chronicle is the exclusive morning paper, the Examiner is the exclusive afternoon paper, and a single ad purchase will appear in both.
At first the only significant competition for the monopoly was presented by a thrice-weekly neighborhood newspaper, the Independent (formerly the Progress). But then came a proliferation of other neighborhood newspapers, trade newspapers, gay periodicals, dozens of ethnic newspapers, and so-called "alternative" newspapers-all with a combined circulation which has outstripped the combined circulation of the two dailies.
The result has been a loss to the dailies of certain advertisers and the daily monopoly's ability to control elections and city policy. When the dailies had absolute power, the mayor and board of supervisors-similar to a city council-were Caucasian heterosexuals, mostly male. Now the mayor is black and the board of supervisors is diverse.
The dramatically different makeup of the governing body of San Francisco does not mean, however, that there has been a radical change in social policy. This new kind of politician is still centrist on most issues and is inclined to favor positions advocated by the biggest corporations. There are signs, however, that the power structure is on the verge of being disrupted by more radical periodicals and their followers.
"Alternative" No Longer Alternative
Until now, the two so-called "alternative": weekly newspapers have engendered the toughest competition for the Chronicle-Examiner monopoly: the Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly. They have done so by following a formula common to "alternative" newspapers all over the country. The paper is available free of charge in unlocked newsracks, buildings, book stores, etc. By printing about 200,000 copies, the "alternative" paper guarantees an advertiser at least that much circulation, but in reality perhaps as much as double the figure in readership, because these are periodicals typically passed on to other persons-verified for the advertiser by independent firm market surveys.
"Alternative" has been placed in quotation marks because periodicals alleged to be in that category no longer are so. They are basically consumer and entertainment guides, with a few anti-establishment stories tossed in, mild ones compared to the former brazen, radical material that was once the staple of the alternative press. Typically this new kind of periodical consists of an issue geared to some consumer or entertainment theme-best hamburger joints, nude beaches, film festivals, book festivals, cheapest gym deals, ways to get romance and sex, etc. Advertisers in the given category are targeted, and they respond in surprising numbers.
The Bay Guardian, the older of the two, is the most dramatic example of financial success through the formula now more or less standardized: give away most of the papers free, depend almost entirely on advertising for revenue, generate advertising through consumer and entertainment themes.
The Bay Guardian was established in 1966 by Bruce B. Brugmann, a reporter for a daily newspaper south of San Francisco. For years Brugmann struggled through debt and hard times to get a skimpy paper out regularly, often going weeks between issues. Once Brugmann converted the periodical into a free consumer and entertainment guide, however, he was on his way to a fairly big business and personal wealth from ad revenue and property investments.
Formerly a sporadic 24-pager at most, today the Bay Guardian is a solidly established weekly containing between 140 and 150 pages per issue, mostly ad content. The periodical is distributed with thick advertising inserts once seen only in the dailies.
Into this mix, as in other cities, came SF Weekly, published by the Phoenix, Arizona-based New Times, Inc. Once the product of anti-Vietnam war radicals, the New Times string of weekly papers is now commercial. An occasional anti-establishment story is tossed into the mix to keep up the alternative image.
Commercial vs. True Alternative
It is a mistake to conclude, however, that the circulation and advertising war thus boils down to one between the dailies and weeklies that are both fundamentally commercial. The war now also pits the phony alternative weeklies against neighborhood and ethnic weeklies and monthlies, and against monthlies that are truly alternative in that they are blatantly anti-establishment, non-commercial, and bursting with the kind of material no longer published by the big, money-rich weeklies which still cling to the alternative label.
None of the truly alternative monthlies has been so embarrassing and so threatening to both the dailies and the weeklies as San Francisco Frontlines. (see accompanying "San Francisco Frontlines" article) Its circulation rise has been meteoric, from an initial press run of 20,000 in April 1997 to quadruple that figure for its May 1998 issue.
Frontlines has a staff of around 100 volunteers. It represents the new San Francisco majority of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, the poor, and immigrants. Freelance writers donate their articles, and the editor and director of operations, Carlos Petroni, takes no pay for his work (he earns his living as a program director of an unrelated nonprofit).
Though born to moderately wealthy parents in Argentina, Petroni agitated against the military regime, was arrested and imprisoned, and was within a few days of being executed when a prominent countryman induced the government to release him upon Petroni's promise to leave the country. Since then, Petroni's attitude has been: "I fear nothing and no one, because by all rights I should have been dead years ago." On that basis Petroni runs Frontlines with a free-swinging boldness that includes occasional ridicule of the fake alternative papers, so that Frontlines has become a growing embarrassment to them.
At the same time, various interests have become worried about the ability of Frontlines to generate support for social policies and political leaders that are outside the Democratic and Republican parties. For instance, Frontlines declined to support any Democrat or Republican for the June primary election, urging its readers to cast their votes for Peace & Freedom Party candidates. Since Frontlines is now capable of generating perhaps a 100,000 votes for such candidates, the paper presents a threat to the mayor, the supervisors, the dailies, and the big weekly papers.
So it's not surprising that in San Francisco, Bay Guardian publisher Brugmann has agreed to cooperate with a newspaper newsrack limitation scheme put forth by mayor Willie Brown and the board of supervisors. Bruggman's own son, Dan Bruggman, hired by the city's Department of Public Works at a salary of $70,000, already has removed 650 racks from streets in the past year on such grounds as improper maintenance and public nuisance.
Irony and hypocrisy are found in this story through the fact that for decades there has been no objection to street newsracks belonging to the dailies and big weeklies, and no newsracks became "nuisances" and "eyesores" until there were some in the hands of other publishers. Now, all of a sudden, the "proliferation of newsracks" has become an "esthetically undesirable blight on the city" that must be removed.
The Coming Court Battle
There is, however, one qualification to the daily and weekly publishers' conspiring with worried politicians to eliminate newsracks. They have conditioned their approval on local control of replacement schemes: substitution of new "pedmounts" for freestanding newsracks. The pedmounts are multiple-rack installations on a single pedestal. They are manufactured, distributed, maintained, and controlled mostly by a French firm, JCDeCaux.
Not even the dailies' officers are wild about the idea of outside control by, and payment of fees to, a private, foreign-based firm for the right to display papers on the streets.
A pedmount scheme controlled by the city, however, is favored by the daily and big weekly publishers. Under this scenario the smaller papers would be devastated if not destroyed. Access to the pedmounts is to be based on frequency of publication and and on circulation. Hence, the smaller and less frequently published a periodical is, the less chance its staff has of gaining a spot on a pedmount. Even out-of-town dailies will have priority over local weeklies and monthlies.
Additionally, the scheme calls for annual fee charges to the publisher for each display space in each pedmount. The cost adds up to many thousands of dollars a year and is potentially crippling to a small, marginally profitable operation.
Consequently, a group of small press publishers has put together a team of civil and constitutional rights lawyers to pursue a combined antitrust and First Amendment lawsuit against the cooperating municipal government threat to wipe out truly alternative periodicals through elimination of their principal means of distribution: freestanding street newsracks. Thus shaping up is what could be the most critical legal-judicial test in publishing history of the right of a municipal government to regulate newsracks and therefore freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
Burton H. Wolfe is a freelance journalist living in San Francisco and the author of five books, including The Hippies, Pileup on Death Row, and Hitler and the Nazis. He was editor and publisher of the Californian in the early 1960s, a seminal muckraking alternative newsmagazine, and is currently a regular contributor to San Francisco Frontlines.
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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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