Out With the Old, In With the New: City Installs Shiny Newsracks for San Franciscans to Befoul
Categories: Government, Media
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| Joe Eskenazi |
| New pay toilets installed in the city! |
Well, it appears you won't have our red newspaper boxes to kick around much longer (literally, as the case may be). The photo above depicts old newspaper boxes huddled to one side, cowering like dinosaurs after the meteor impact, as city workers install brand spanking new newspaper racks. As we've reported before, those racks are owned by the city and underwritten by Clear Channel (which collects all the ad revenue). Newspapers are now forced to pay $60 a year for the privilege of storing our editions there for you the reader (this rate was doubled from $30 earlier this year). This, by the way, was something of a Godfather offer -- the city has since zoned all the sites where it is placing these new racks to no longer allow old-style machines like those on the left.
While the city charging newspapers an extra, say, $12,000 to $16,000 a year (or more) isn't endearing -- and the print media is just swimming in surplus cash these days -- the new newsracks do have their upside. For one, when miscreants fold, spindle, or mutilate the new racks, it's Clear Channel that'll send a handyman out to fix them, not the individual papers (SF Weekly circulation director Wesley Chung will be happy to tell you about the time he found 17 pounds of bagels crammed in one of our boxes in West Portal, and a family of mice ran like hell when he turned the machine over. Now that'll no longer ostensibly be his bailiwick.).
The above photograph was snapped on Church and Duboce. Camera-toting San Franciscans will soon be able to snap similar shots at West Portal, Geary, Clement, and Irving.
Happily, no more than, say, 10 pounds of bagels could fit in any of these individual newspaper slots. So this is progress.
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