San Francisco News Blog

After a while, they all blend into one another; the terms "Dear Mr. Joe," "AMAZING!" and "Your readers" become one big Evel Knievel toilet. Until now. That's because we've gotten an e-mail -- from a man and a company we're going to do a massive favor to and not name -- offering San Franciscans "fun" suggestions of what to do when waiting in line to hear Sarah Palin speak.

Allow that statement to wash over you as you gargle its ridiculousness. Because if there's one thing San Franciscans need, it's a way to pass the tedious hours as they wait in block-busting lines to hear the dulcet tones of Sarah Palin.

Will joint ad sales bring happy days back?

​Apparently Singleton's MediaNews Group -- owner of legion Bay Area newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune, Marin Independent Journal, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News -- is forming an ad-selling partnership with Philip Anschutz' Clarity Media Group, which owns the Examiner, a free tabloid daily distributed in San Francisco and San Mateo County.

This alliance, called the "San Francisco Bay Area Buy," will enable joint sells of ads to run in 14 of the companies' newspapers, according to the Journal. The idea is apparently to take on the ailing but still-dominant player in the market, the San Francisco Chronicle.

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The column asked: How could a toxic-waste dumper be stamped officially green? Isn't that taxpayer-funded greenwashing?

In response to our inquiry, (but after our deadline) Sushma Dhulipala Bhatia, who directs the city's Green Business program, kindly investigated the matter, and offered some insight into how a major toxic waste dumper might become an officially designated local green business.

The designation was based in part on the fact Sims didn't use toxic chemicals to clean up the San Francisco pier they where collect recyclables, and that the company made sure wastewater at that pier didn't spill into the bay, Dhulipala Bhatia reported.

To our minds, this is kind of like Typhoid Mary earning a health and safety award for washing her hands after going to the bathroom.

But we'll let Dhulipala Bhatia speak for herself. Here's the e-mail we received from her:

Dot what?

A portal to the soul

​The American Civil Liberties Union's San Francisco-based Northern California office is launching a campaign to beef up Internet privacy. In a statement released today, the ACLU seeks to "spotlight the need to upgrade laws protecting consumer data" and unveils its nifty new Web site, dotrights.org (try saying that URL aloud five times), which features a two-minute video primer on the issue.

The statement notes that the federal law which ostensibly safeguards Internet privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was drafted in 1986, back when the only folks with Internet access were Army scientists and aliens. Today, companies and even government agencies take advantage of this lax legal landscape to collect, subpoena, and sell personal information gleaned from our Web-browsing habits -- such as what books we've recently bought.

So it was that San Francisco awaited Saturday's episode, which explored the strange case of San Francisco French dual citizen Hugues de La Plaza, who met a bloody, mysterious end in his Hayes Valley apartment in 2007.

The show's final verdict seems to be that, like other matters public import, the essence of the de La Plaza case was: Who's right, America or France? And the answer is apparently La Republique Francaise.

How many tweets will this buy?

​Yet the company probably doesn't intend to spend its nest egg on its withering newspaper properties.

Citing unnamed sources, New York Post columnist Keith Kelly reports that Hearst is sitting on a $1 billion war chest, which it probably plans to invest in "digital and non-traditional media." Kelly notes that while the Chronicle and other Hearst papers "have had near-death experiences over the past year," the company's magazines remain relatively stable. Hearst continues to bring in $7 billion of revenue annually and is still profitable as a whole, according to Kelly.

And yet, Newsom's legitimately bizarre behavior since he withdrew from the governor's race made the severance of his 12-day Twitter silence into newsworthy fodder for both the Chronicle and local television stations. Yet the news for Newsom's attention-starved 1,239,249 Twitter followers was even better than reported on TV. Newsom authored not one but two Tweets in the past two days; soon he may yet begin speaking in complete sentences to reporters and his colleagues in city government.

Yet if we're going to cover the ephemera of Tweets, we're going to have to really cover the ephemera -- so we'll be nit-picky and point out that neither the Chron nor TV got the story quite right. As noted above, television reports didn't catch that Newsom sent two messages instead of one. The Chron reported that both messages were sent on the same day when they came on Nov. 10 and Nov. 11. And neither reported that Newsom is still listed as "Candidate for Governor of California" in his Twitter bio.

If only there were a method of rapidly conveying short messages that Newsom could utilize to instantly inform millions of people that he's dropped out of the gubernatorial race. What a pity. 

But while all we get these days are Godot-like messages from Newsom's spokesman, Nathan Ballard, making empty promises that the mayor will not talk today -- maybe tomorrow -- an article that appeared in the New York Times dated Nov. 7 suggests he is indeed conducting interviews with "the media."

News headlines Monday suggest our warning was valid. Advanta Corp., a bank holding company specializing in small business credit cards announced today it was filing for bankruptcy, throwing into question whether the company would pay in-full investment notes advertised in the Chronicle's business section less than four months ago.

On July 12 of this year,  Advanta, bought an advertisement on page D-2 of the Chronicle's business section, surrounded by ads touting ordinary bank certificates of deposit, announcing: "You can now earn: 1 year -- 11.00 percent."

The announcement seemed unbelievable, given bank interest rates at the time topped out at about 2 percent. It apparently was. Investors now seem doomed to receive pennies on the dollar.

Hugues de la Plaza

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French government investigators, meanwhile, conducted their own review of the evidence, weighing in solidly in the murder column.

The case was cited in new stories around the world as evidence of possible San Francisco police incompetence.

And veteran 48 Hours Mystery producer Josh Gelman was assigned to get as close as possible to the bottom of what really happened the night de la Plaza died. In doing so, he turned up a copy of a heretofore unreleased report, conducted by a consulting medical examiner at the behest of the San Francisco Police Department, that concludes de la Plaza was murdered.

The story didn't coincide with the headline. The purported San Francisco backlash consisted of one guy  on a bike who got a ticket for running a stop sign in Portola Valley. More striking, however, was the question of what strap-hanging Big Apple readers might find interesting about a San Mateo County traffic ticket -- even one wrapped in the sort of bogus Times trend story Slate columnist Jack Shafer has made a steady sideline of outing. (Ex SF Weekly editor Shafer's latest roundup began with a story about a phony NYT-reported trend in which men supposedly grew pot-bellies on purpose because it had become fashionable.)

Eh.

​We'd like to award the Wall Street Journal's Bay Area section with an even slightly less enthusiastic response than we gave the New York Times. And here it is:

"Eh."

We have our reasons. 

At first, the the addition of Bay Area sections to the nation's most prominent national newspapers sounded pretty exciting. Talented, experienced reporters from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal would be penetrate our sad, sad news vacuum, rewarding their target market -- educated, affluent readers -- with graceful prose and well-reported stories.

Plenty of people (including this reporter) subscribed at special-offer rates.

Then the Times ran its debut Bay Area section, and as you may recall, it produced in Will Harper, managing editor of SF Weekly, the following reaction: "meh." The section was short and the news stories weren't news to savvy locals. Still, the addition of sophisticated prefixes to names were enjoyable. Perhaps things would get better with time?

Now comes the Wall Street Journal Bay Area section, which appears to have peeped at its predecessor's section and essentially reproduced it, only with financial flair. (Know this, Wall Street Journal: you lost the "m" in "meh" for being a copycat). The Journal format is strikingly similar to Times' section, with a couple of newsy stories, one of which is  missing key information; a Q&A that probably took some reporter all of 20 minutes; and a couple of culture stories that aren't very new or interesting. 

Daly is entitled to write whatever he pleases -- and, on Fog City Journal, it seems he can truly write whatever he pleases; the Web site serves as the Kato Kaelin to Daly's O.J. Simpson.

But we are also entitled -- and some would say obligated -- to point out that the central premise of Daly's diatribe, that articles in SF Weekly and San Francisco Magazine are part of "The Big Rollout," that shadowy, high-placed apparatchiks of downtown sidled up to us and said "Hey kiddo, I'm rich and powerful and I've got a pitch for you" -- is bunk. Not only is it bunk, it reveals a lot more about Daly than about Sparks (or us). Along with a large portion of the city's hard left, Daly seems disturbingly eager to engage in paranoid conspiracy theories.

"This is the craziest thing that's ever happened to me," Sean C., as he's known on Yelp, told SF Weekly. "If I had a gun she'd probably be dead right now."

The fiasco started when Sean C. posted a two-star Yelp review for Ocean Avenue Books in the Ocean View neighborhood last week, warning: "This place is a TOTAL MESS."

​Brown's office has released a resignation letter from Gerber, dated today, in which the former head of the AG's press office admits to "serious errors in judgment." He continues, "I suspect that the few reporters involved in the calls I taped would have readily said yes, but nonetheless it was wrong not to ask them first." Gerber states that, "as a result of my actions, I realize that I can no longer effectively serve the Office of the Attorney General."

Last week, the Chronicle reported that Gerber had taped an on-the-record conversation with Chron political reporter Carla Marinucci and two senior staff attorneys from the attorney general's office. While his actions were probably not illegal under state law, they ran counter to the typical protocols followed by both reporters and government spokespeople, and caused an unwelcome scandal for Brown, the current front-runner in the 2010 governor's race.

In a statement sent to SF Weekly in response to questions about the incident, Brown staffer Christine Gasparac said the spokesman, Scott Gerber, "has been put on administrative leave and appropriate disciplinary action will be taken." The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that Gerber had recorded a conference call with Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci without informing her beforehand.

​"Mr. Gerber's recording of certain telephone conversations was done without Attorney General Brown's knowledge and in direct violation of explicit directions regarding office policy," Gasparac wrote. "These conversations were on the record and in no sense confidential. Nevertheless, the explicit agreement of all parties should have been obtained."

​Turns out that a flak in Brown's press office recorded a telephone conversation he had this week with Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci and two senior staff lawyers from the AG's office about a ballot measure on car insurance. The story -- by Marinucci and fellow Chron scribe Joe Garofoli -- takes pains almost immediately to imply that the action might have been illegal, citing a relevant section in the California Penal Code in the third graph.

So far, sounds like a great story: The state's top law-enforcement official breaking the law in a manner suggestive of the sleaze and secrecy that so many of us love to loathe in government. The only problem is that the actions of Brown's press office, while unquestionably stupid and a PR blunder, are almost certainly not illegal -- as the Chron should know.

SF Weekly's proud Baby Mama of the Year now has a blog

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Eliana Lopez, the Venezuelan soap star who gave birth to a son this year with Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, launched a Spanish-language blog this month about motherhood named maminatural.  Its glamorous tagline: "Being a woman, being a mother, being natural,"

With 18 followers so far, Lopez spins out advice for new moms and natural birth, and includes some sassy photos of herself pregnant as well as of Mirkarimi in his early forays into fatherhood. (Cheese/heartstring alert for the pic of Mirkarimi smiling up at Baby Theo in a redwood grove.) 

Naturally, we're partial to the post in which she announces she won "Best Baby Mama" in SF Weekly's 2009 Best of San Francisco issue. Here's what she had to say:

"The newspaper San Francisco Weekly named me the best new mom of 2009. I think that they were captivated by the photos that Franca Franchi took of me pregnant, and that's why they picked me. :-)"

Daniel C. Britt

Drool Brittania: British cougars Rita Sangha (left), 39, and Bea Cameron, 45, make nice to the camera during August's "National Cougar Convention"

​Do people complain to Rich Gosse about the use of the term "cougar" -- previously applied to a 1970s-era muscle car and, of course, a beast -- for older women with a yen for younger men? Yes. Yes they do. All the time. But he doesn't care.

"We used to have cougar parties in San Francisco before the term 'cougar' was invented," says Gosse, proprietor of the non-profit (!) Society for Single Professionals, which he runs out of his San Rafael home. "We called them 'Younger Men Older Women Parties.' No one knew we were alive. Now we do 'Cougar Parties' and we're famous. I love the term cougar."

Indeed, Rich Gosse is a cougar impresario. Readers may recall his "National Cougar Convention" held down the road in Palo Alto (SF Weekly's summary: "More cleavage than a butcher shop run by Eldridge Cleaver"). Now, searching for a new wrinkle in the "older women-younger men" mileu, he's struck on a novel concept: The nation's initial Cougar Sadie Hawkins Dance, set for San Francisco on Nov. 14.

Uhhh, Rich? Will twentysomething men who don't understand the meaning of the term "don't touch that dial" or even "shake it like a Polaroid picture" really comprehend a 70-year-old Lil' Abner reference? "They will have no idea," he concurs.

Daniel C. Britt

Reloading for battle...

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Now comes more bad news for our journalistically crippled cousins: During the six-month period between April and September, the Chronicle's circulation dropped more than any other major daily in the country. According to Editor & Publisher, the Chron's circ declined 26 percent -- down to a total of 251,782. That's less than half of the paper's circulation back in 2001 when it was more than 530,000.

The spin on the numbers from Chron execs is that this is all part of their business strategy. It may seem strange that losing readership is part of a strategy, but that's their story.

Click on this image for a larger version

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Last week, we ever-so-slightly spat out some of our coffee when we noticed an interconnected conspiracy theory chart a la Lyndon LaRouche in our rival publication, the Bay Guardian. The graphic purported to reveal the vast cabal squelching progressive thought and action worldwide -- and it certainly does reveal something.  

While it's far from zany to point out that wealthy conservatives have many fishing poles in many ponds, once you start interconnecting "The Rothschilds," "British newspapers," "Richard Nixon," and "Spain" in some grand plot -- the cheese has neatly slipped off your cracker.

And yet, it gets worse. Not only is the Guardian convinced there's a worldwide conspiracy to strangle progressive thought -- there's also an international plot to undermine the Guardian! Atop this article is the flow chart prepared by Guardian higher-ups outlining the myriad forces in league against this thing of theirs -- which we obtained by slipping an old Muni pass and a signed glossy of Tom Wopat to one of the paper's unpaid interns.

Click on the image for a truly gargantuan version. And the truth will be revealed.

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And then there were none...

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Back in August, a group of more than 100 unruly sea lions swarmed the Hyde Street Pier, claimed it for themselves, and seriously pissed off nearby boat owners, fishermen, swimmers, and especially Port of San Francisco wharfinger Hedley Prince. (Here's our cover story documenting the adorable infestation).  

Part of Prince's job involves maintaining the Hyde Street Pier. So when it's covered in smelly, sharp-toothed, 800-pound wild animals, that's kind of stressful. Prince looked into a variety of ways he could deter and banish sea lions, which included exploding seal bombs and shooting rubber bullets at them. But in the end, the port went with the slightly friendlier option of installing barricades.

Turns out, even those may not be necessary. As of Monday morning, the Hyde Street Pier sea lions are no more. They simply vanished, leaving Prince mystified and The CBS Evening News with a non-starter of a story. (CBS was only the latest in a media dogpile regarding the record number of sea lions hanging out in the Bay).  

Prince says a CBS producer had been calling, e-mailing, and interviewing him for a week, and that a crew had come to film the installation of the barricades on Monday. "We go down there," Prince says, "and not a single freaking sea lion was on the docks."

That's not Mayella Ewell, Your Honor.

​If asked to choose a picture of actress Collin Wilcox-Paxton out of a lineup, most of you could not. But you wouldn't mistake her for Gregory Peck. Or would you?

The actress, best known for her role as Mayella Ewell, the horrid, white trash fabulist whose bogus rape accusation against a black man forms the crux of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, died this month at age 74. The Chronicle's online edition ran an Associated Press obituary along with the above AP photo (we are uncertain at this time if this photo graced the print edition, too). Sadly, however, that photo is of Gregory Peck in his well-known role as Atticus Finch. It could have been worse; it could have been Peck as Captain Ahab.

This is an AP story and an AP photograph -- so it's unclear exactly who's at fault here. Some readers may recall that earlier this year the Chron and papers worldwide used an AP photo to accompany the obit of actor Patrick McGoohan who "died suddenly" -- and the snapshot was of the actor with a gun being held to his head. 
 

The commute to San Francisco is even worse than Fairfield's

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Well, there has been some good reading to be had. I was particularly fond of a blog entry in which scholars parsed the legality of Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors' dueling approaches to city sanctuary policies. But we must admit we were befuddled by Thursday's Bay Area roundup. Beneath the header "The Bay Area: 9 Counties, 8 Bridges, 7 million people" was a link to a story about -- Fullerton?  

While the Bay Area's boundaries stretch a long way, Fullerton is pushing it. That city -- home of the largest liquor store I've ever visited; it was like a football field -- is a scant 408-mile, six hour and 21 minute drive south. It's not in the Bay Area. But Bay Area section editor Felicity Barringer says she and her staff are well aware of this.

Appearing alongside an article by Guardian reporters Rebecca Bowe and Sarah Phelan about the "media machine behind the assault on progressive ideas" is a spiderweb conspiracy chart that puts John Nash's scribblings in A Beautiful Mind to shame. The idea, as far as we can tell, is that a vast array of nefarious entities worldwide -- more than 80 are listed -- are connected to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the right-wing bloviators at Fox News. (The print version of the chart is pictured below; click here for a crisper PDF from the Guardian Web site.)

Et tu, DIRECTV?

​We have to admit that the conspiratorial wickedness of some of the parties named here had previously been unknown to us. Were you aware, for instance, that an entire sovereign nation -- "Spain," as the Guardian simply notes -- is linked to "British newspapers" via "Satellite TV" and "Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush"? Or that "Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly" are secretly colluding with "J. Rothschild Capital Management Limited (London)" and the "U.S. Department of Justice"?

SFGate readers can be forgiven for feeling this photo is eerily familiar... ​

​In this space we sometimes criticize the Chronicle and sometimes praise the Chronicle. This article does neither of these things. This time, we're simply a bit rattled.

Here's the deal: In the interrim between  walking away from SFGate on our home computer, nearly burning down the kitchen with a breakfast mishap, and returning to the computer, the photo of an attractive young couple gracing a Chron light feature on hookah bars had suddenly jumped to a breaking homicide story in which the man in the photo was accused of killing the woman and then setting their home ablaze.

At first glance, one would think this was some manner of editing error; the wrong photo being placed next to a breaking news story. But, no: The photo SFGate was already running on its home page just happened to be of the two people in all the world featured in a breaking homicide story.

Hey Phil Bronstein -- how do you like them apples?

​San Francisco Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein yesterday reminded the Bay Area of a use for newspapers any puppy owner is well aware of when he inaugurated a journalistic pissing contest. It was a move he may soon regret.

In what was decidedly not a "Welcome to San Francisco" gift basket aimed at the interloping New York Times, Bronstein accused Times bureau chief Jesse McKinley -- whom he snidely did not name -- of "borrowing" a juicy anecdote about Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts. In both McKinley's Friday story and a Chron story from Aug. 18, Batts is extensively quoted as saying that he initially spurned recruiters' offers to come to Oakland, but changed his mind after the tragic slayings of four Oakland officers.

"Here we are, always bitching about how Google or MSN or Yahoo is stealing our original content and making money from it," wrote Bronstein. "It doesn't really help our case if we're raiding closets and borrowing outfits from members of our own fraternity without at least asking."

By the way, Bronstein's accusation of "borrowing" is just a passive-aggressive way of calling out the Times for sloppiness at best and plagiarism at worst. It's a big deal. And, in the end, it turns out to be hilarious -- because on Aug. 12, a week before the Chron story Bronstein referenced, Batts told the same anecdote to the Long Beach Press Telegram (though they did not lead with it, like the Times and Chron). If the Press Telegram's "editor at large" wrote a bombastic column about the Chron "borrowing" his paper's material -- well, we missed it. Meanwhile, it seems Batts is a man who likes to repeat his anecdotes to anyone with a notepad or microphone. Let's all make a note of this. 

Coming to a Bollywood picture near you...

​It's not quite a Slumdog Millionaire story: Vivek Agrawal is a Stanford grad who lives in a Pacific Heights flat and spends his days working as a product manager at a tech start-up. But the 24-year-old has just landed a huge break -- beating 300 contenders in an online karaoke contest to sing in a Bollywood movie.

In July, Agrawal entered the BollyStar contest hosted by Saavn, a digital provider of Bollywood content online, and State Farm Insurance. Agrawal was planning to sing a cover into a Web cam as required for the contest, but a co-worker urged him to film a low-budget music video instead out on the Santa Monica pier. That's her in the sari in the entertaining video on Agrawal's Web site.

While the song "Kabhi Kabhi Aditi" is in Hindi (except for one repeating English line of "Everything's gonna be okay") Agrawal explains the song is about a guy cheering up a pouting girl. (Apparently the puppy at the end does the trick.) Compare it to the original from the 2008 Bollywood movie Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na.

Not a disaster, no -- but not 'King of the World' either...

​The nation's paper of record launched its new Bay Area section today to compete with San Francisco's paper of record. So how does the Times' San Francentric coverage measure up? Well, let's just say the Times is no Chronicle. And, believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment to the Chronicle.

The "section" is all of two pages long and, for the most part, doesn't tell locals anything they don't already know. The "Indicators" column contained three items that should all be familiar to readers of the Chron or Examiner (for instance, there was an item on bridge tolls going up, which has been widely reported by the local press). The wine column spotlighted overhyped restaurants like Nopa, Slanted Door, and A16. Even non-wine snobs in the city know about these places.