Promote local journalism by bidding to end paywall
At The San Francisco Chronicle, we once buried treasure.
In an outlandish 1950s promotional push, Chronicle staffers hid the “treasure” of the 19th century eccentric Emperor Norton in a wooden box somewhere in San Francisco, encouraging readers to dig up the city in search of a $1,000 prize. (We can’t do that anymore on account of all the holes. You can imagine the havoc we caused by setting loose all those people and all those shovels.)
Over the paper’s 156year history, The Chronicle has run all kinds of campaigns to boost the newsroom. We have given away watches, sewing machines, stadium seat cushions and San Francisco snow globes. In one particularly popular promotion in the 1880s, The Chronicle offered doubleaction pistols with an annual subscription to the weekly Chronicle, yours for just $3.90.
But we’ve never given readers the power to make subscriberonly Chronicle stories free for everyone — until now.
Today, The Chronicle is launching its first nonfungible token, or NFT, an animated card representing our popular Best Bay Area Views Guide. The buyer gets the NFT and the power to remove the paywall on the page, making the guide to some of the region’s top outdoor spots free for everyone, forever. If the bidding surpasses the reserve price for the token, all additional proceeds will go to The Chronicle’s flagship charity, Season of Sharing.
Along with the Best Bay Area Views Guide, we’re also debuting an NFT collection of digital postage stamps illustrated by Chronicle artist John Blanchard featuring San Francisco landmarks, Coit Tower, Alcatraz Island and the cable cars. We plan to add to the collection with stamps of more beloved San Francisco sites, including a few worldfamous bridges and lesserknown highlights that locals love. Proceeds from the sales, minus fees, will also go to Season of Sharing.
What exactly is an NFT? It’s a digital item or piece of art that includes a snippet of code stored on a blockchain establishing its authenticity and who owns it. It can be one of a kind or an edition in a series, and it can be bought, sold and traded, like a van Gogh painting, a 1952 Topps Willie Mays card or a piece of memorabilia collected just for fun.
This year, the market for NFTs has exploded. OpenSea, where The Chronicle is posting our collection, has more than 20 million listings, and digital artist Beeple recently sold one of his collages through Christie’s for a recordbreaking $69 million.
Media companies have entered the fray, too. In March, the Associated Press sold an NFT artwork depicting the 2020 presidential election Electoral College map as viewed from space for $180,000. The New York Times recently sold a digital token of a column about NFTs for $560,000, donating the proceeds to its Neediest Cases Fund.
A word about Season of Sharing. Since 1986, The Chronicle charity has raised $163 million, served 45 million meals and helped 165,000 Bay Area families stay in their homes. Season of Sharing is unique in that 100% of all donations goes to help our Bay Area neighbors when they need it most.
This is also an experiment. It’s no secret that the journalism industry is struggling to fund local news coverage. There has been a dramatic drop around the nation in coverage of state and local governments, schools, health care, local arts and even high school and community sports. Through subscriptions, advertising and our printing business, The Chronicle is continually looking for ways to support our community with critical local news coverage. If this sale works, could future NFT sales fund local news? We don’t know. But we consider this a first attempt to see if NFT ownership can have a realworld impact on this problem.
What do you get if you buy the Best Bay Area Views Guide NFT? Well, you get the token itself, a handful of our favorite Bay Area vistas that Chronicle Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub has been assembling over the past two years. The guide’s photos are a visual road map for all the best angles to see — and photograph — the Bay Area. Even longtime residents will be amazed at what Peter, with the help of our readers, has found.
And because many NFT auctions include extra perks and giveaways, we’ll report back on who bought the NFT and attach the person’s name and a note about the sale to the article itself, so it’s viewable for thousands of readers who will now get to see it for free, forever. You will be a hero (OK, maybe not a hero, but people will be grateful).
Of course, NFTs aren’t all cryptokitties and NBA highlights. Creating a digital token requires energy, and there are real concerns about the carbon footprint of NFTs and the cryptocurrency Ethereum that underpins most transactions. Efforts are under way to adapt that currency to a more energy efficient model, which could create a greener NFT economy. We’re paying attention, both to the developments and to the environmental impact of our NFTs. And we’ll continue to report on environmental issues that affect Californians.
So, yes, The Chronicle is hawking treasure once again, but this time hundreds of shovelcarrying readers won’t be descending on the city. If you want to bid on the paper’s first NFTs — and make a subscriberonly guide free forever — visit opensea.io/accounts/ sfchronicle.