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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After getting shelled in 1940, Subway Sam Nahem told a New York Daily News reporter "I am now in the egregiously anonymous position of pitching batting practice to the batting practice pitchers."

Despite the bizarre casting of Sylvester Stallone and 48-year-old Michael Caine alongside an international team of the world's greatest soccer stars, Victory remains one of the best of all sports movies. A team of POWs overcomes a crack squad of Nazis -- in a fixed match, no less! -- and escapes to glory.

Victory was inspired by a true 1942 story of Ukranian untermenschen, who defeated a team composed of The Master Race, 5-3. There was no escape to glory, however. Only a trip to the camps -- and, for many, death. World War II is not the richest vein from which to mine true-to-life, feel-good yarns.

And yet, there is one little-known WWII story practically screaming to be made into a heartwarming Hollywood blockbuster. And no whitewashing of death and despair would be necessary. That would be the amazing 1945 triumph of the ragtag, integrated Overseas Invasion Service Expedition baseball squad over the mighty 71st Division squad -- which was stocked with Major League talent and, by definition at the time, all white.

A stirring article about the games by Robert Weintraub appeared yesterday on Slate. Weintraub briefly notes that the sole "name" player on the OISE squad was journeyman Major League Pitcher Sam Nahem; this article doesn't have a lot to say about him. But Nahem was a man with a lot to say. Fifty-eight years after the games in front of 50,000 soldiers packing Nuremburg's Hitler Youth Stadium, we walked into Nahem's sunny Berkeley living room.

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Charles and David Koch, the oil-baron brothers who pump millions of dollars into right-wing causes, are looking to purchase the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly reported earlier this month.

For people who care about newspapers, as well as those who care about preserving democracy in general, putting the top daily of the state's most populous city into the hands of the Koch brothers amounts to a dystopian scenario.

No surprise, then, that more than 100,000 people have signed a petition asking the Tribune Company to not sell their paper to the Kochs "or any other propagandists."

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Vance Cardell

...tous les membres de l'assemblée se sont fait foutrement avoir

Readers wondering how the French are seeing the ongoing fiasco that is the America's Cup -- and how they'd translate the line "all the members of the Board of Supervisors were fucking played" -- have been granted a two-for-one special.

Last week, Le Monde ran a short story titled "Qui paiera la facture de la Coupe de l'America?" (Who will pay the bill for the America's Cup?). The article neatly encapsulated the ongoing tussle surrounding the incredible shrinking regatta: Organizers now actually embrace a revised prediction claiming the race will bring far less business to the area than initially pledged. They also claim that tax revenues from the scaled-down race will offset anemic private fund-raising.

This was not part of the original deal -- and no one pointed that out more  forcefully than Supervisor John Avalos. Here's how he put it:

See Also: Prior America's Cup Coverage

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Naked Sword

Supervisor Scott Cox before (and probably after) he gets a blow job

As promised, we're keeping our readers abreast of the upcoming release of the much-anticipated porn parody, The Cover Up, which pokes(!) fun of San Francisco's new public nudity ban.

Naked Sword's film, which was shot right here in San Francisco's Castro District, features some rather graphic gay porn scenes starring Supervisor Scott Cox, not to be confused with Supervisor Scott Wiener. But don't worry, we embedded the censored trailer for you, so you can still tool around watching this while on the job.

See Also: Local Porn Stars Shoot Parody Film About S.F. Nudity Ban

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Facebook/ Friends of the San Francisco Chronicle Guild

Believe it or not, reporters are people, too

Technically, Chron workers will walk out today, but it's not a walkout, per se. As SFist reports, the union is staging a quiet yet visible protest this afternoon, hoping to draw even more attention to their ongoing health care squabble.

At 3:15 p.m. sharp, the workers over at 5th and Mission streets will take (probably for the first time ever) their entitled 15-minute breaks and leave the office to have a healthy jaunt around the Hearst building. You will know it's them because they'll probably be donning all red and perhaps looking a little more pissed-off than usual.

See Also: Chronicle Staff Fights Their Health Care Squabble on Twitter

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A nice place to live...

Earlier today, we ran an article about the GOP harnessing the seemingly limitless hatred of Nancy Pelosi within its membership to turn the occasion of the House minority leader's 73rd birthday into a "RETIRE NANCY" fund-raising bash.

Slate's Matthew Yglesias was puzzled by Republicans' visceral hatred of all things San Francisco, stating the only problem with San Francisco is that that "there's not enough San Francisco."

Cavalcades of people should be moving here, he continues, "But in fact total population growth in the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas has been rather slow, since for people to move there we'd have to build more houses. Zoning and other permitting restrictions have tended to make that quite difficult" -- thus jacking up housing prices.

That makes a lot of sense. But, counter-intuitively, it's not entirely true.

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After launching its hard paywall on Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle looked to its social media-savvy reporters -- and their prodigious Twitter feeds -- to help sustain traffic on its new "premium" website.

Instead, the reporters launched a massive Twitter strike over the calloused health care proposals of Hearst Corp., the Chron's New York-based parent firm.

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The paywall that San Francisco Chronicle flirted with for years appeared over the weekend, accompanied by a euphemistic letter from Chron president Mark Adkins. He characterized it as a safe harbor for the paper's "premium content" (ie, news and columns) "uncluttered" by the slideshows, celebrity gossip, and other link bait that clogs SFGate.com.

While SFGate will remain free, retaining event listings, breaking news, and staples like "Day in Pictures," the Chron's bread-and-butter news will be reserved for subscribers only.

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