Last week's San Francisco Bay Guardian rally outside the Westfield Mall — where the Guardian was housed until its Oct. 14 closure — was both a memorial for the progressive alt weekly and a time of reckoning for local media.
Mastheads are thinning as print newspapers hatchet their editorial staffs, and many of the local tabloids are no longer thick enough to swat a fly. As Pacific Media Workers Guild Executive Officer Carl Hall told the assembled crowd, "Even those new websites are having trouble."
The Guardian has suspended plans to buy itself back from current owner San Francisco Media Company (which also owns SF Weekly), and has instead launched a modest Indiegogo campaign for a commemorative issue. Other outlets, meanwhile, are trying more aggressive strategies.
Like hiring an outside PR firm to shill their content.
The San Francisco Chronicle tested that gambit after watching its circulation plunge by roughly one-third since the beginning of 2009. Absent that print readership, the paper's editorial staff unveiled a slew of innovations to boost web traffic; the marketing team, meanwhile, tried to publicize Chron stories through other vessels — among them the Weekly.
In July, Weekly writers received the first of several bubbly emails from Chronicle PR contractor Allison & Partners. "Wanted to share the SF Chronicle's exclusive interview, released this morning, with SF Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow about his fight through muscle disease," the email said. "Would you be interesting [sic] in speaking with the reporter, [C.W.] Nevius, about this story?"
The pitch was unusual and gutsy: Asking a newspaper to cover the coverage of its larger competitor is a bit like trying to sell vegetables to a guy who's already cultivating a bean patch. That irony wasn't lost on Nevius, who says no one took him up on it.
Two months later, the Weekly got another PR blitz about #LoveLocalSF Day, a citywide event in November cosponsored by Mayor Ed Lee and SFGate, the Chronicle's digital media arm. This time, the invitation was to speak with Chronicle President Kristine Shine, who spearheaded the marketing effort. She says it's a way to leverage the brand.
"We're doing a lot of new and fresh things, like making our reporters appear locally as commentators, producing this big event, redesign[ing] SFGate," Shine says. "We've got a big strategy in 2015."
That strategy has elicited mixed reactions from industry observers. San Jose Mercury News editor and vice president David J. Butler says he couldn't imagine his own paper sending out press releases to broadcast its editorial content. But local publicist Dale Carlson thinks it's a brilliant idea.
In fact, Carlson did the work for Allison PR last week, distributing Sen. Dianne Feinstein's anti-Airbnb Chronicle op-ed to various papers the day before it hit the streets.
Then again, he is leading the campaign against Airbnb.
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