The San Francisco Press Club has the newsiest blog in the Bay Area
By Bruce B. Brugmann
I have always had a fondness for the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.
I was an early member back in the middle 1960s in the good old days when there was real daily newspaper competition on the Peninsula.
I was a young reporter on the old Redwood City Tribune, fresh from a tour of reporting duty on the Milwaukee Journal and getting the local experience I needed to found the Bay Guardian in San Francisco.
I spent three years on the Trib, from 1964 to 1966, as a liberal conservation-oriented reporter under the aegis of Publisher Ray Spangler and Managing Editor Dave Schutz. Let us say that my views and reporting habits differed from theirs, but I nonetheless had a field day covering the scandals of the era.
I picked up on how PG&E operated as it worked with Stanford University and the Atomic Energy Commission to impose high powered transmission lines through Woodside and the gunsights of Attorney Pete McCloskey.
I spent late Monday and Tuesday nights covering the council and planning commission meetings in Belmont and San Carlos and later in Redwood City. (If I left early, the council s would often roll some bad stuff through. But I would check the next day and do a juicy follow story on the late night chicanery.) There were wonderful save the bay stories: the dirthaulers would scoop up the dirt in the green hills of the Peninsula, haul it in double gondola dirt-hauling trucks down Ralston Avenue in Belmont, and dump it into the bay for fill for Foster City and Redwood
Shores. And, through it all, Mayor Wallace Benson of Belmont would hold pre-council meetings at the old Villa Chartier restaurant in nearby San Mateo and polish the policies to keep the dirt flowing from the hills to the bay.
When I called him on his indiscretions, Benson would wave his cigar and say, “Bruce, if you don’t think I deserve some champagne and Maine lobster for running the city of Belmont, then you just go and vote me out office.”
I was having a field day. Spangler and Schutz were quite nervous about my aggressive reporting, but each told me in his own way that I could do the stories as long as my facts were straight. I also had an excellent city editor, Michael Kernan, who protected me. Years later, after I sent Spangler a copy of a Guardian expose, he wrote me a letter in longhand, “Bruce, you were a pain in the ass. But you were always worth it.” That was probably the nicest compliment I ever got from a publisher.
Well, the reporters and editors from the Peninsula papers would meet now and then in a hotel bar off the Bayshore Freeway for drinks. It was a convivial affair, even though we competed and there was real daily competition and the San Mateo Times of J. Hart Clinton was in head to head competition with the Redwood City Tribune and Burlingame Advance-Star (which with the Palo Alto Times were under the umbrella of an organization known as PNI , Peninsula Newspapers Inc.) This group became a press club and ultimately the proud San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, despite the sad sad deaths of three PNI papers and the gutting of the San Mateo Times/Singleton and deathly journalism until the Palo Alto Weekly of Bill Johnson. The club is, I am happy to report, still going strong under the stewardship of Darryl Compton and a batch of fugitives and expats from Singleton and Knight-Ridder journalism. They produce a vigorous annual newspaper contest, some zesty parties, the most newsy blog in the Bay Area, and the feel that there is still some real watchdog journalism on the Peninsula.
Let me make the point with some headlines from the club’s Tuesday Oct. 2 blog edition:
Media News profits up; Singleton gets $l.8 million
Rosenthal: Journalists are being eliminated
Ridder disappointed by today’s Merc (B3: what did he expect?)
Ex-Merc editor finds herself in a firestorm
Station group urges rejection of Hearst bid
Citing finances, KQED cancels ‘Pacific Time”
Clint Reilly gets free space from Media News (B3: hot news: remember the Singleton exec saying Reilly was a liar and that he would have to pay for his columns according to the terms of his antitrust suit settlement. The blog even runs a Reilly column with the telling admission. Does this count as a Singleton lie?)
Merc accounting error means cuts
Guild files new charge against MediaNews (B3: when will our daily newspapers ever hire a fulltime labor reporter to report on all the major labor issues of the day?)
In short, the Peninsula Press Club blog shows what a good media column can be. Now it needs to check and see how many reporters are regularly covering the council and planning commission meetings till 2 a.m. from Brisbane down to Palo Alto. That would be a good story. B3
Click here for Peninsula press club blog.
