Exit Redmond...

Tim Redmond, the editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and a 30-year employee of the paper, has left the building.

Redmond acknowledged his departure via this terse post on his new blog. He claims "a major disagreement over personnel and editorial direction" with Todd Vogt, the president of the San Francisco Newspaper Company, led to Redmond's abrupt departure. The former editor says Vogt informed him his resignation had been accepted, but claims to have never submitted a resignation.

Vogt is also the president of the San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly.

Also announcing a departure today from the Guardian "effective immediately" was Caitlin Donohue, the paper's culture editor. Guardian staffers were told that earlier plans to eliminate three editorial positions have since been stayed, for now, with the departures of Redmond and Donohue.

Vogt has not yet returned SF Weekly's messages. A written statement from Stephen Buel, the S.F. Newspaper Company's editorial vice president, is printed below:

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Wants more money

Just like BART employees, fruit pickers, janitors, and pretty much everyone else who isn't in the tech industry, newsmakers over at KRON4 are not happy with their paychecks.

Last week, contract negotiations between KRON4 employees -- represented by the SAG-AFTRA union -- and management broke down -- again.

It's been over a year since a contract for the roughly 30 employees represented by the union expired, and the issue is lingering like a story with no ending.

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It's great to be granted tacit permission by our colleagues down the hall at the Guardian to cover matters relating to CleanPowerSF.

It's not so great, however, to read an article about the city's clean energy program essentially urging readers and reporters alike to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain -- to avoid quibbling over "details" because CleanPowerSF is The Way.

City residents must overlook even glaring shortcomings, as the program cannot advance toward the pot of local energy at the end of the rainbow -- the dreamed-of "local buildout" -- if we don't do our part. Our part would be not asking questions, paying the high rates for CleanPowerSF, and trusting that the revenue bonds issued against our premium rates will be used to transform San Francisco into an ecotopia.

Ronald Reagan didn't say too many brilliant things, but he was definitely on to something when he uttered "trust but verify." As SF Weekly recently verified in a cover story, CleanPowerSF has lofty "goals" to achieve laudable ends -- but no plan.

That is still the case.

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Anthony De Rosa

Yet another journalist has fled the world of traditional newswires to join a start-up. This time it's Anthony De Rosa -- social media editor at Reuters, prodigious tweeter, breaker of developments in the Boston Marathon bombings, small-time celeb in an era when journalists foreground both their bylines and their avatars.

Yesterday he announced plans to defect to the new San Francisco-based media company Circa, which produces an app that allows consumers to follow the day's news on their smartphones. Its closest analogue might be Summly, the summary news app that Yahoo acquired for $30 mil, except that Circa uses human editors.

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The Chron finally puts out an interesting story

Last week, Mark Adkins, who served as the Chronicle's president since 2008, was -- for undisclosed reasons -- transferred to a less prestigious Hearst paper in Beaumont, Texas. The company put out a small blurb, congratulating Adkins on a "promotion" that would be very hard to sell as even a lateral move. On top of the fact that the Beaumont Enterprise has a weekly circulation not quite a quarter of the Chron's, Beaumont makes Bakersfield look like Barcelona.

Hearst Corporation announced Wednesday that San Francisco Chronicle President Mark Adkins has been named publisher of the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise. Since September 2008, Adkins had overseen print and online revenue initiatives and business development for The Chronicle's suite of products.

"Congratulations to Mark in his promotion to publisher in a great city close to family and friends," said Chronicle Publisher and Chairman Frank Vega. "I am deeply grateful for Mark's leadership in digital marketing, product development and his strong outreach to the business community."

Interestingly enough, that would be one of Vega's last quotes in the newspaper -- which today announced he too is parting ways with the Chron.

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The new CIR investigative team

March 22, San Francisco -- Center for Investigative Reporting Executive Director Robert Rosenthal announced today that the CIR will improve the quality of its journalism by doing way less of it.

Instead of running three organizations (the CIR, California Watch, and The Bay Citizen), Rosenthal said, the organization will save staff time and money by merging California Watch and The Bay Citizen into the CIR, changing three organizations that covered local, state, and national news into a single organization that uses the same resources to cover less local, state, and national news.

Providing less local and state coverage will reduce the total amount of local and state coverage, Rosenthal acknowledged. But, he said, by "reorganizing our internal creative decision-making and production process, and doing less journalism, we can position ourselves to be the highest-impact, most innovative reporting organization we can be. So it's a win-win, only less so."

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Meta reporting

You know crime has gotten out of control when thieves are not only victimizing news reporters, but also the security guards specifically hired to protect news reporters from would-be thieves.

Today another crew of journalists was burglarized during an interview in broad daylight, just a week after Oakland was named the nation's robbery capital, followed by a turnover of two police chiefs in two days.

According to the Chron, a KGO-TV news crew was interviewing the owner of Loakal, an art gallery and boutique at the corner of 2nd and Clay streets at Jack London Square, when unidentified crooks smashed the window of the news van and then made their way to the security guard's Chevrolet Cobalt parked across the street and broke into it.

See Also: Oakland Is Officially More Exciting Than S.F.

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Language frames discourse. Which is why liberals say "global warming" and "estate tax," and conservatives say "climate change" and "death tax." This sort of dichotomy has been most apparent in ongoing immigration debate, which has birthed a wide range of synonyms: "undocumented immigrant," "illegals," "illegal aliens," and, of course, the often default "illegal immigrant."

Last month, the Associated Press decided to stop using those loaded terms. Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll called the practice "a lazy device" that "ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone's life to become the modifier before their name."

This week, Poynter reported, the San Francisco Chronicle is following that lead. The paper's reporters will no longer refer to people using the term "illegal immigrant."

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Executives at the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's LGBT newspaper, announced yesterday that they are restructuring the paper and partnering with executives at The San Francisco Newspaper Co., which owns the Examiner, SF Weekly, and the Bay Guardian.

The Reporter's publisher Thomas E. Horn and General Manager Michael Yamashita told their staff yesterday afternoon that the Bob Ross Foundation, which owns the Bay Area Reporter, has signed a letter of intent with Todd Vogt and Patrick Brown, both shareholders in the three papers. To be clear, this is not to say that the Reporter has been sold, rather that a new company will be formed: BAR Media Inc.

"This solves a myriad of problems that just have to be solved," Horn said, adding that "the paper will continue to be LGBT-majority owned and operated."

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He's got a theory

From print to broadcast to online, there's very little the media's gotten right about this Boston tragedy before getting it wrong multiple times.

The New York Post exaggerated the death toll from Monday's Boston Marathon bombings by 400 percent before joining InfoWars in misidentifying three different people as possible suspects throughout the week. And during last night's lurid Twitter-Reddit-cable news orgy of speculation -- as shootouts and manhunts across the Boston metro area unfolded on smartphones and computer screens worldwide -- more innocent names were circulated and smeared before the media mob moved on just as quickly.

Excellent reporting on this misreporting, by The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal and others, suggest that once sufficiently frenzied, there's not too much to separate the Internet kangaroo court from mobs of the past in making something huge out of literally nothing.

Not to be outdone or made irrelevant, right-wing radio has also been participating in the witch-hunt. San Francisco's own Michael Savage has a theory, a theory that somehow made it all the way to the halls of Congress.

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