“San Francisco Chronicle” Items

Changing Jobs Without Moving

In August 1985 I quit the San Jose Mercury News [that’s a different story] and joined the San Francisco Chronicle as its first Photography and Graphics Editor.

Part of the job switch was a ‘run from’ the Mercury News; part was the undeniable challenge of creating a professional editing process for the Chronicle.  I love telling this story:

When I went to the Chronicle, I replaced a box.  A wooden box that photographers dumped their prints into; a box that wire photos and graphics were dropped. The news editors pulled what they wanted or needed from the box.  After my arrival, we established that an editor would help the news editors get the images that best told the story.

By the way, I took the box with me when I left the Chronicle.  It holds bits and pieces of digital equipment.

While I joined the Chronicle in early September, the announcement in Editor and Publisher did not come out until Feb. 22, 1986.

Saying Goodbye to Great SF Chronicle Photographers

One of my great joys working at the San Francisco Chronicle was the photography department.  I was the first real photo editor at the paper and one of my goals was to improve the opportunities for the photographers to contribute to the paper’s journalism.  [Before I arrived at the paper, photos were often dropped off at the news desk into a wooden box.  I like to joke that I put that box out of a job.]

The photo department did a visual goodbye when I left for The Arizona Republic in June, 1987. It was a great team of friendly and hard-working journalists.  These photos are by Gary Fong, the chief photographer.  Gary and I remain friends.  He is in the front row, in the center.

On the far left side is another friend, Bryan Moss.  I hired Bryan as a food photographer, with no experience in food photography. But that’s another story.

 

Changing The Chronicle’s Visual Image. Or Not.

In late 1986, I wrote a memo to the paper’s publisher (Richard Thieriot) and editor (William German) urging a discussion about the design of the San Francisco Chronicle.  It was a memo deeply rooted in understatement as both Thieriot and German saw little need to change the appearance of the newspaper. I urged a gradual approach, an evolutionary method of updating the typography and design of the newspaper.  Part of the argument for change involved addressing the weakening economic aspects of the paper.

However, now is the time in which we must look ahead and decide on the type of newspaper we wish to present to our current readers over the next several decades. And we need to decide on what type of paper
will be necessary to attract new readers among those who live in the Bay Area but do not read The Chronicle.

While change would eventually come to the paper, the reaction to the memo was mostly silence.

I did like making this point about the importance of design:

While design cannot keep readers, but it can attract them to the paper and let the content and editing hold them. We are missing out on readers who move to the Bay Area from other parts of the country who are accustomed to a more organized, easily readable design in their daily newspaper.

To the casual reader, the images in the memo aren’t very dramatic.  However, if you knew the Chronicle from that period, you would remember they were still using wavy rule boxes around photographs.  Yuck. Kudos to John Sullivan for his work on the prototype pages.