S.F. losing its last alternative weekly paper
Come October, San Francisco will be a city without an alternative weekly.
After more than 40 years, SF Weekly, San Francisco’s last-standing alt weekly, will cease publication “for the foreseeable future” at the end of the month, the paper’s editor in chief, Carly Schwartz, confirmed Friday.
The weekly, which had a circulation of 65,000, was sold, along with the San Francisco Examiner, to Clint Reilly Communications last December. In an email, Schwartz said the decision was made to pause SF Weekly to “double down on our efforts with the Examiner.”
News of the pause, first reported by Stuart Schuffman, a blogger better known as Broke-Ass Stuart, was not entirely surprising; alt weeklies around the nation have struggled for more than a decade to stay afloat. That, however, didn’t make the loss any less sharp.
“The loss is incalculable,” said Joe Eskenazi, the managing editor of Mission Local who worked at SF Weekly for nine years starting in 2007. “A robust alt weekly tells you the most unvarnished version of what’s going on in the city. … It doesn’t play by the niceties of daily journalism.
“San Francisco has never needed a functional alt weekly more.”
Unlike daily newspapers, alt weeklies tend to serve the news with a bit of edge and a truth-to-power energy. Their weekly format allows writers to take a step back from the daily news cycle, “wait until the dust settles and write a really searing analysis,” said Nuala Bishari, a reporter for San Francisco Public Press who worked as news editor for the Weekly from 2016 to 2019.
The work was hard, Bishari said — as news editor, she essentially “just covered everything.” But it was also rewarding. She found the weekly had a special connection to some of the city’s most marginalized, both because of its coverage, but also because its physical copies were free to the public.
“Some of the best journalists in the city came out of SF Weekly,” Bashiri said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to have that kind of editorial freedom again.”
Through the years, the paper snagged numerous awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies for everything from design to investigative reporting. In 2002, it also won a prestigious George Polk Award for its coverage of nuclear waste at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
More recently, the California Newspaper Publishers Association awarded Bishari first place in digital writing for a piece published in SF Weekly about the Camp Fire’s devastating toll on the town of Paradise’s older population.
“The golden age was decades ago, but alt-weeklies’ specific combination of scrappiness, wackiness, progressivism, and profanity is crucial for grabbing people’s attention and holding self-important jerks to account,” Peter-Astrid Kane, who served as editor of SF weekly from 2017 to 2019, wrote in an email. “I’ve never poured myself into something like I did with SF Weekly, and the odds of me ever having a job that fun again are essentially nil.”
The Weekly’s last remaining two full-time staffers, Nick Veronin and Ben Schneider, will both move to the Examiner — Veronin as an editor and Schneider in a reporting role, according to Schwartz. As for what will happen with the many freelancers who kept the Weekly full of content, Schwartz said only that “(w)e are discussing all sorts of options at the moment.”
The website and its archives, she added, will remain intact.