Progressives mourn passing of Bay Guardian
When the Bay Guardian abruptly stopped publishing on Tuesday, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano likened the closure to “a death in the family” that the city’s progressives would need time to mourn.
But the 48-year-old newspaper had been on life support since founders and spouses Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble sold it to the San Francisco Media Co. in 2012. Like at just about every other print outlet around the country, revenue had fallen and staff had been laid off.
Rich DeLeon, a retired professor of political science at San Francisco State University and a historian of the city’s left, said the progressive movement has lost its “ideological super ego.” He said the Guardian’s demise is “sad. But it is kind of like your great-grandfather dying at 95. It led a good life and it was extremely influential at some point.”
David Latterman, a University of San Francisco political analyst, said the paper’s closure was inevitable, not only because of its failing business model, but also because of the continuing loss of its highly partisan readership.
“It had an impact 10 years ago, but at best its support could affect 10 percent of the vote,” he said. “More recently, it’s probably about 3 percent.”
The sale of the paper also robbed it of its image as the plucky underdog, with the new corporate ownership identity eclipsing Brugmann’s founding promise to “print the news and raise hell,” said
“There are a lot of blogs and writers out there with a strong point of view, or are snarky, but there is not a lot of reporting going on.”
Lydia Chavez, editor of Mission Local
political consultant Eric Jaye.
Still, its loss has been keenly felt, especially among progressives who have lost their mouthpiece.
The “biggest impact is that there won’t be that 800-pound gorilla for the community to rally around,” said Alex Clemens, a political consultant and founder of the Usual Suspects blog, an online aggregation of the city’s political news from sources large and small.
“But with any kind of information vacuum, it will open up opportunities for others to step into that leadership void,” Clemens said, noting that there are “dozens, if not hundreds” of bloggers and online commentators in the city, and every neighborhood has some kind of news outlet.
The challenge is that no journalistic outpost with a sharp progressive point of view has enough reporters or is popular enough to step into the breach.
“There are a lot of blogs and writers out there with a strong point of view, or are snarky, but there is not a lot of reporting going on,” said Lydia Chavez, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and editor of Mission Local, an independent online site that covers news in the Mission District.
Chavez and a few progressive leaders praised former Guardian Editor Tim Redmond’s 48hills online news site as retaining the Guardian’s progressive bent.
Others cited the on-line sites DailyKos and the Huffington Post, though they focus on national politics and are not specific to the Bay Area.
For Public Defender Jeff Adachi, the Guardian’s closure isn’t just about the loss of a news source or the progressives’ bullhorn. It means the loss of an institution that could effect real political change.
He said the Guardian’s investigations were largely responsible for the creation of the Office of Citizen Complaints to monitor the Police Department, the city’s liberal public records laws and the 2003 freeing of John Tennison, who spent nearly 14 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
“Perhaps we’ve taken the Guardian for granted and assumed there would always be a voice and a medium for progressive views in our city,” Adachi said. “Now that it’s completely gone, the void will definitely be felt.”