Editorials

Yes, Berkeley people do read the San Francisco Chronicle on occasion. It’s always amusing to know what Chris Daly is up to. Sad to say, there’s less and less to read in the Chronicle these days. The Datebook section is increasingly pathetic. If the budget permits an occasional excursion to The City, Joshua Kosman’s reviews, though sometimes irritatingly choleric, are the best way to make sure you get some bang for your buck at the major SF performances. Otherwise, today’s Chronicle is pretty forgettable. 

An item in the East Bay Express suggests that Chron icle editors are toying with a lite paper (how could it get any liter?) in order to reach a younger audience. This is presumably based on the assumption that all young people are the mindless airheads who pick up the sex-drugs-rock’n’roll-‘n’-cusswords weeklies inflicted on us by the national corporate chains. Part of the package we got when we took over the Daily Planet was subscriptions to trade magazines aimed at publishers. These magazines regularly print articles by middle-aged white guys in suits about how to dumb down newspapers to appeal to the TV generation. These guys don’t seem to understand that a major portion of their audience, young and old, has defected, not to TV, but to the Internet, in search of more substance in their reading, not less. 

Since the Chronicle was taken over by the Hearst Corporation, another branch of the national corporate media, one of the few continuing bright spots has been Jon Carroll’s column. When Jon wants to, he has the knack of raising serious major moral issues in a compelling way. Sometimes, of course, he prefers to write about cats or what he did on his vacation, which is a lot less interesting but still relaxing. Recently, he’s been vacationing for long enough that we’ve considered putting our Chronicle subscription on vacation hold. We marked his return date, Nov. 9, on the calendar and toughed it out. So now he’s back, and what does he say in his first column? 

"For the next year or so, I will be writing three columns a week rather than five. I do not want to cut back, nor do my editors want me to cut back, but bureaucratic exigencies have prevailed. This temporary curtailment has nothing to do with either with my political opinions or my health. Please set your paranoia meters to zero." 

Sorry. Not nearly good enough. What does he mean, “bureaucratic exigencies”? Does he mean that the mighty Hearst empire is having cash flow problems? His editors like him, but his publishers don’t? His demographics are wrong? Inquiring minds want to know. 

Here at the Planet, we can offer a partial solution. Jon says he’s able to write five columns a week. For whatever reason, his corporate masters now only want to print three of them. The Planet hereby offers to take the other two for our two issues each week, paying our usual high two figures if he needs the money. The Berkeley audience being what it is, we would prefer to get the non-cat non-vacation columns, which should work out since his two Chronicle columns this week have both been vacation. The last time I offered Jon a regular column was in the late 70s, when I was an editor at Pacific News Service and he was at loose ends. He didn’t take me up on it then, but now, in view of the very dangerous political situation in which we find ourselves, he might want to reconsider. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.