The creation of The Sunday Times comes a year and a half after Knight-Ridder paid top dollar to buy the five-newspaper Contra Costa Newspapers chain from the Lesher family, a longtime presence in Contra Costa and Alameda counties. With the paper's debut, Contra Costa Newspapers executives, who had been cagey in discussing competition for East Bay readers, have come out in the open with their challenge to the Chron. (The Ex's presence across the bay is too vestigial to warrant much notice.)
"We want you to have a newspaper that is so complete and relevant to your life," wrote Contra Costa Newspapers Editor John Armstrong in a March 30 note to readers, "that it not only is a 'must read,' it is the only newspaper you need to read."
The Sunday slot, typically a paper's largest profit-generator, is ripe for picking. The Chron/Ex Sunday paper's East Bay circulation declined about 10 percent from 1993 to '95. It's now down to roughly 180,000. By contrast, The Sunday Times' circulation has been rising steadily and, at 204,000, now tops the Chron/Ex in the race for Sunday East Bay readers by a healthy margin.
The weekday picture is similar. Although scarcely visible on this side of the bay, the Contra Costa papers have a combined circulation of roughly 194,000 in the East Bay. That's almost 20,000 more papers than the Chron sells in the immediate San Francisco market (San Francisco and south down to Daly City), and more than three times the number of papers the Ex sells in the city on weekdays.
The new papers give greater prominence to national and international stories. The graphics are more sophisticated, and, in the Sunday paper, a new tabloid insert was created, "Perspective," tripling the paper's opinion pages.
The Sunday Times isn't exactly new. It is the ably redesigned and restructured replacement for the five separate Sunday papers Contra Costa Newspapers used to put out. The five weekday papers, which are based in Richmond, Walnut Creek, Antioch, and Pleasanton, retained their individual names. They have undergone similar makeovers, so they resemble the larger-circulation Sunday paper.
The makeover of the Contra Costa chain was reportedly nine months in the making and is costing Knight-Ridder "several million dollars" in added costs each year, according to Contra Costa Newspapers Chief Executive Officer George Riggs. That extra expense load represents a pittance for Knight-Ridder; the company's 1996 revenues topped $2.7 billion and it recently laid out $1.65 billion for four dailies owned by the Walt Disney Co.
Still, the stakes in the East Bay are sizable. Knight-Ridder paid the Leshers a hefty $360 million for their properties, more than a 70 percent premium above the benchmark price of $1,000 per subscriber for daily newspapers. Granted, the papers were profitable, if parochial and retrograde in their editorial content. But Knight-Ridder was buying more; it was paying the price of admission into the fast-growing markets of the East Bay: Contra Costa, Alameda, and, to a lesser extent, Solano counties.
Knight-Ridder was also buying a neat geographic fit with its nearby property, the 280,000-circulation San Jose Mercury News, which has come to dominate the south end of the bay and much of the Peninsula. It, too, has prospered at the expense of the Chronicle, slowly seeping farther northward into San Mateo County.
Both Knight-Ridder papers can do well if they maintain growth rates that keep pace with those expected in their rising markets, but to flourish -- to win the coming East Bay newspaper war -- the papers must continue to steal readers and advertisers from the Chron/Ex.
As recently as a few months ago, Riggs sounded conciliatory toward his cross-bay rivals. "We'll keep doing a good job, and eventually," he said then, "people will realize you don't have to take the paper from across the bay." Riggs insisted last week that his papers will continue to "stick to our knitting" and leave the Chron to its own devices.
But for The Sunday Times, knitting looks suspiciously like a highly organized plan to acquire full newspaper dominance in the East Bay.
John Armstrong ended his March 30 note to readers with the advice to "Stay tuned."
His choice of a broadcast analogy is fitting. Television and radio stations determine what they show their audiences using the numbers in the Arbitron and Nielsen ratings books; while no such finely tuned measurement devices exist for newspapers, Knight-Ridder tries to achieve the closest thing. It invests heavily in market surveys, focus groups, and other techniques to measure market preferences. It then acts on those findings and shapes its papers -- both look and content -- accordingly.
That's how The Sunday Times came to be.
In his After Deadline column in the March 23 paper, Armstrong cited "the most exhaustive market research in our company's history, conducted by one of the nation's leading media research firms." There was also a reader survey and "a series of frank and open focus group meetings." The headline of the column, tellingly, was "You talked to us, and we listened."
All that market research is being put to visible use in the early editions of The Sunday Times. That first Sunday paper was built around a cover story that explained simultaneously the reasons for the paper's changes and the demographic state of the East Bay suburbs. "Faces of the East Bay/ Region finds its own identity" was the headline, which could as well have been amplified by the promotional tag line "... and finds its own newspaper to go with it."
Under the rubric of a "special report" on the "dynamics of where we live," staff writer John Boudreau produced a schmaltzy valentine to East Bay life, with a few grains of sadness about a former sales executive who's now homeless thrown in for leavening.
The inside spread was an impressive graphic achievement; a mix of pie charts, bar charts, and black-and-white photos, it could have doubled for Contra Costa Newspapers' marketing plan. In fact, it is part of the marketing plan, Armstrong readily conceded. And finding such naked market analysis in the space traditionally reserved for reporting is journalistically unsettling.
But Knight-Ridder can't merely surf the wave of growth. The firm will have to claim a regional mantle if it is to exploit the East Bay's regional economy. That means promoting the East Bay as a region with its own identity, and encouraging East Bay residents to confer that identity on Knight-Ridder's papers.
This reality raises a central question: How does a daily newspaper bolster a region's identity without acting as one of its boosters?
"It's difficult to sometimes tell who is the dog and who is the tail," says Ed Diokno, an assistant city editor at the Antioch Ledger-Dispatch who has also worked at the Oakland Tribune under two ownership groups. "We write about certain issues because we think they're important to focus on. At the same time, the issues we pick to focus on shape the way readers think."
And the readership of the Times and its five constituent papers is a mix of readers with wildly varying interests.
Many readers, Diokno explains, are from Silicon Valley and the Inner East Bay, and some are even transplants from San Francisco. (Antioch is east of Walnut Creek.) Nearly 90 percent of East Bay residents work in the East Bay. That means they'd rather read business news from Livermore than a community notebook item about a potluck dinner down the street in Antioch, he adds.
But Knight-Ridder is also mindful of the Contra Costa chain's longtime readers, Diokno says.
Editorially, the result of trying to please both groups is mixed. The tone of the writing tends to be cautious, the story selection closely calculated with an eye toward focus group results and market surveys more than any easily discerned editorial philosophy. Exhaustive guides to hiking trails and book readings can make the Contra Costa papers read like a Martha Stewart broadsheet.
The Contra Costa papers will occasionally slam local polluters and politicians. The reporting and writing, however, often sounds one-dimensional or naive. Frequently, the real story is buried in a recitation of facts. And larger stories can lack necessary analyses.
An April 13 cover story in The Sunday Times was headlined, somewhat feyly: "Growth: Eastward ho!/We could become like L.A."
The package that followed, which included a masterful graphics display, was technically a balanced story; it gave growth advocates and critics approximately equal amounts of space. In keeping with the civic-minded tone the paper has adopted, there was even a section for "solutions." However, the only concrete suggestion for addressing the problem of East Bay urban sprawl was an increased gas tax -- with no reference to the political upheaval such a tax hike would cause.
And the package missed a chance at a real story: the actual reason why the East Bay will look like L.A. in 20 years unless current practices change. None of the region's leaders, from the mayors of tiny rural enclaves to the Governor's Office, has had the moxie to make politically risky land use, transportation, and water policy decisions that would limit or control growth. The Sunday Times spread was a perfect opportunity to hold some of those officials to account, but only a handful were quoted, and then just to flesh out the statistics.
On March 27, 39 cultists killed themselves in San Diego. On March 28, Contra Costa Newspapers ran one of the Bay Area's most comprehensive packages of stories on the event, capped by a startlingly bold Page 1.
The entire top half of the page, except for the masthead, was taken up by a blown-up photo of a cultist's corpse. The photo wasn't unique. It was taken from one of the wire services and was used by many media outlets. But the Contra Costa Newspapers editors' decision to run it so large created stunning results. Especially in the Contra Costa Newspapers boxes, where the photo was all that could be seen. It was a truly daring step.
Sadly, the editors backed down from their statement the next day.
On March 29, Editor John Armstrong was back with another letter to the readers. The front page backfired, he wrote contritely, because it caused "revulsion in many of you."
Speaking later, Armstrong denied the note was a retraction or apology of any kind. "You can characterize it any way you want," Armstrong said. "I don't think of it as an apology." He also insisted he never admitted to a mistake.
But the tone was clear. He wrote that "there are lessons to be learned" from the negative response. Among them, "we must never fail to exercise restraint, to doublecheck ourselves."
And, he said, "[w]e come away from the experience ... concluding that we failed to exhibit the degree of respect and restraint that our readers have come to expect from us."
It came off as patronizing, intellectually dishonest mush. The layout was a grabber. It was guaranteed to stir a response.
Why the apology? Why not just let angry readers write letters, and publish as many as possible?
"There's a certain expectation your readers have as to what kind of newspaper you are. Any time you move out of that field of comfort, you need to do it carefully," Armstrong said.
But there's a crucial distinction between respecting readers and condescending to them. Failing to make that distinction is a prescription for failure.
And what about future controversial stories? The photo flip-flop will not have a chilling effect on the paper, Armstrong asserted. But he acknowledged that in the future, editors will consider reader expectations when making news decisions.
Although perhaps oversolicitous of its readers, The Sunday Times is almost certain to be an improvement over the five poorly written, parochial papers it replaced.
Even Ben Bagdikian, the UC Berkeley dean of media monopoly watchdogs, is glad that Knight-Ridder came to Contra Costa: "A lot of people were relieved that Knight-Ridder bought the papers. It has a higher reputation for news, and [the late] Mr. [Dean] Lesher didn't. It [Knight-Ridder] also is not so dumb as to ignore the fact that this is a growth area."
Knight-Ridder's record is hardly one of unqualified support for journalistic quality. Its flagship paper, the Miami Herald, was beset by staff defections a few years ago amid salary freezes and rumors of layoffs and buyouts.
But Knight-Ridder's recent $1.65 billion purchase of four Disney-owned papers is a notable commitment to the future of newspapers.
At the least, with the creation of The Sunday Times, Knight-Ridder is now better-positioned to take advantage if Dean Singleton's Alameda Newspaper Group and faltering flagship, the Oakland Tribune, lose much more ground in the Oakland market.
Armstrong and Riggs both declined to speculate on future moves in regard to Oakland.
But the Antioch Ledger-Dispatch's Diokno says that "everybody's poised" to go into Oakland, his old professional stomping grounds.
And if Knight-Ridder does go in, muses Bagdikian, "it'll be decided by a computer analysis instead of an individual wanting to take on Dean Singleton."
Phyllis Orrick can be reached at SF Weekly, Attn: Unspun, 425 Brannan, San Francisco, CA 94107; phone: (415) 536-8139; e-mail: porrick@sfweekly.com.
