Guardian stuck in time warp in this city of constant change
Not so long ago there was a big sign on the side of an impressive building at the foot of Potrero Hill. You couldn’t miss it from the Interstate 280 freeway. It was lit up at night in red capital letters maybe 5 feet high, like a beacon, like a warning light. GUARDIAN, it said.
The letters gradually winked out, one by one. After a while the whole sign went dark. Then one day, it was gone. And last week, the Guardian itself, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which had been printing the news and raising hell for 48 years, was dead.
Economics, the decline of print and the shift to the Internet killed it, the blogsters and Twitterati all said. I think they were wrong. Nobody killed the Bay Guardian. It died of hardening of the arteries. It died of old age.
Big changes in 1966
Think back to 1966, when the Guardian was founded. San Francisco was in the middle of the biggest changes in generations.
The port was in decline, the old manufacturing stalwarts that made San Francisco a bluecollar city were moving out, new buildings were going up all over. Suddenly it seemed the city was full of new people: hippies with flowers in their hair, gays and lesbians who saw San Francisco as a new mecca, young people from all over the coun- try, from all over the world.
The city was run then by a kind of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic network, a coalition of leftist working-class labor and conservative big business. They were rooted in the city. Everybody knew everybody.
But change was in the air: The new people brought change. They challenged the old establishment. They questioned the old way of doing things.
It was a perfect time for a paper like the Bay Guardian. It was founded by Bruce Brugmann and his wife, Jean Dibble, who had come to the Bay Area only three years before.
Brugmann was the star of the show, the face of the Guardian. A big man with a beard, he held forth like the prophet Jeremiah. The city was in the hands of grasping developers who planned to turn it into Manhattan, his paper said. And worse: The region was under the thumb of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which had cheated San Francisco out of its rightful heritage of public power.
The politicians were bought and paid for. The media? Well, they were part of the Ex-Chron-KRON-PG&E-Manhattanization-Raker Act conspiracy.
It was a great show, and much of what the Guardian said was valid. Brugmann used top-notch investigative reporting to make his points. He took credit for scaling back some of the bigger projects. The Guardian’s political endorsements were much sought after by progressive politicians. For a long while, San Francisco really was the capital of the Left Coast.
Guardian in time warp
But the city changed again, and the Guardian didn’t, a fatal turn for a paper that was the shrill voice of change.
The Guardian, it seemed, was in a time warp. It wanted to keep San Francisco just the way it had been when its staffers arrived here.
It still denounced Manhattanization, even when that battle was long over. Just look around. San Francisco already IS a mini Manhattan, with more of the same on the way. The crane is the city’s official bird. What else could the city do? Reopen a steel plant?
Another new wave of San Franciscans showed up and flooded the city: techies who changed the world. But the Guardian still was going on about the old causes, like Don Quixote, off on a crusade that had run its course. The best the paper could do was denounce those unloved Google buses.
“The Guardian hasn’t always adjusted so well to the technological and cultural changes of the last decade,” Lynn Rapoport, a former Guardian managing editor, wrote in San Francisco Magazine’s blog. “It’s had trouble spiking its political message in a way that piques the interest or commands the respect of readership much beyond its base.”
“The saddest thing about the Guardian’s downfall is that the paper had faded from relevance at a time in San Francisco’s history when the high-flying tech sector is threatening to engulf everything about it that the Guardian and its loyal readers held dear,” Will Oremus wrote in Slate.
Brugmann sold the paper a couple of years ago. Tim Redmond, who was an editor there for 30 years, keeps the light burning with an excellent blog called 48 Hills.
And Brugmann, at 79 the lion in winter, hopes the Guardian and its causes can still live on the Internet. “Digitize the news and raise hell,” he said.