Text by Sarah Phelan
Proposed cuts at the Chron will be painful and could even be fatal for the city’s most influential daily.
Cutting half the Chronicle’s staff. Outsourcing operations. Busting the union. Selling the Chronicle to media baron Dean Singleton. Closing down the paper entirely.
All these equally strange and bleak media futures were hovering on the Chronicle’s horizon, as representatives for the paper and Hearst Corporation met with leaders of the Northern California Media Workers Guild today, in an effort to keep the Chronicle open, after Hearst announced it will close San Francisco’s daily paper, if cost-cutting plans don’t pan out.
After a morning meeting spilled into the afternoon, representatives from Northern California Media Workers Guild released a bulletin, saying they met with reps from the Chron and Hearst to discuss “the cost-cutting proposal.”
“We opened the meeting by underscoring our commitment to our membership and the community to do all we can to reach an agreement that will keep The Chronicle open and return it to profitability,” Guild representatives stated.
But Jerry Roberts, a former Chronicle managing editor, burst out laughing, when informed by phone that one of the aims that emerged from that meeting was to return to profitability a paper that has lost $50 million a year.
“That will definitely be an uphill slog,” said Roberts, who left the Chronicle seven years ago to become editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press and is now an adviser to the Daily Nexus, UC Santa Barbara’s student newspaper.