By Steven T. Jones
San Francisco financier Warren Hellman is one of downtown’s most complex and interesting figures, as I learned years ago when I worked on an award-winning profile of him. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch and spoken every few months, often about the state of the print media in San Francisco and around the country.
Earlier this year, as the Chronicle was having its problems, we again talked about the need for a more sustainable media model and he said that he planned to contact Hearst executives and explore the possibility of creating a nonprofit paper, a goal that other less connected and endowed entities have also been pursuing (including The Public Press, on whose steering committee I’ve served). But Hellman has the pull to get top executives on the phone and to generate significant capital.
Now, as the San Francisco Business Times reports, Hellman has made significant progress and says he intends to make an announcement in two months about how he plans to create a new print media presence in San Francisco.
We wish him luck and are anxious to see what his team comes up with.