S.F. advocacy group acquires Bold Italic
“We want to keep it to celebrating the people, the food, the cultures of this city.” Sachin Agarwal, on acquiring the Bold Italic
GrowSF, a San Francisco political fundraising and advocacy group, said it has acquired the Bold Italic, a long-running San Francisco blog that has sputtered of late, from Medium. The publishing site had operated the Bold Italic since 2019.
GrowSF, launched two years ago by two former tech professionals seeking to confront civic issues by supporting politically moderate candidates and causes, said Medium approached them several months ago with an offer to take over the stewardship of the Bold Italic blog — for free.
“We don’t see this as a money-making operation for GrowSF,” said Steven Buss, 36, who co-founded GrowSF with Sachin Agarwal after moving to the city in 2016. “We’re constantly flooded with such bad news, and the Bold Italic is a breath of fresh air. It celebrates what’s great about the city.”
The blog — at one time known for its lighthearted and snarky accounts of San Francisco culture — has flatlined more than once since it was founded in 2009 by IDEO and Gannett, a major newspaper publisher.
Recently, the blog has featured infrequent write-ups by a small group of contributors about restaurants and businesses in San Francisco, along with a few posts about climate and architecture.
In 2015, just two months after the blog announced it was ceasing operations, it announced it was coming back under new ownership. But that didn’t last long, and in 2019, the tech publishing platform Medium announced it had acquired the Bold Italic.
Medium’s CEO, Tony Stubblebine, told The Chronicle that the acquisition comes at the tail end of a recent policy change within the company to find “new homes” for a number of blogs the startup has maintained.
“We want to be in the business of helping other people be publishers, not in the business of being publishers ourselves,” Stubblebine said. “(We’re) just not able to give it the love that a dedicated local team could give to it.”
Stubblebine said the startup didn’t intend to choose a political organization, but that what they were looking for was the most “credible group” to take over the Bold Italic. GrowSF was the most “clear-eyed” about where to take the blog, he said.
“If we have an agenda here, it has nothing to with Medium and everything to do with the Bold Italic getting the boost it deserves,” he said. “We think that these owners are the best possible longterm home for them.”
Agarwal, 42, said that their ultimate hope behind acquiring the Bold Italic is to revive a beloved brand at a time when many people are “deciding to put their roots down and invest in the city again.”
GrowSF’s leaders insisted they had no intention of using the Bold Italic as a vehicle for its San Francisco political work, and maintained the blog won’t be a mouthpiece for them — it’ll be more like “Humans of San Francisco,” they said, referring to the visual storytelling series inspired by the original New York photoblog that reached worldwide success.
The political group produces voter guides and recently poured money into supporting the recalls of three San Francisco school board members and former District Attorney Chesa Boudin. The advocacy group also formed a political action committee in November to oppose District Five Supervisor Dean Preston’s prospective 2024 reelection bid.
The new owners’ next step is to find an editorin-chief for the new Bold Italic, which will keep its name and all of its articles.
Agarwal and Buss said they’ll be exploring a number of different models to compensate their writers, although much of the content will likely be crowd-sourced: short dispatches from locals who want to send in submissions about news items like restaurants opening on their block.
“Our plan is not to make the Bold Italic political,” Agarwal said. “We want to keep it to celebrating the people, the food, the cultures of this city.”