Where to get sf weekly

As Rocky would put it, that trick never works. Your humble narrator worked at SF Weekly under three ownership regimes but not the present owners. In my tenure there, writers grew younger, because older read: more experienced, more costly workers were jettisoned. Increasing demands made of a depleted workforce were not, to put it mildly, family friendly. Quality journalists decamped for better paychecks or a more stable work atmosphere.

And yet writers continued to show up. And many of them did good work, because journalists can be held hostage by their ideals and aspirations and dreams. And management knew this. So, we are all poorer for not having a functional alt-weekly in town. And not merely because more professional journalists and more credible outlets is better than fewer. But because alt-weeklies, specifically, best understood how a city worked — or did not work. Reporters elsewhere often share the real story with their colleagues over a drink after work.

At an alt-weekly, the real story was the story in the paper. But the second half of the quote not being included in the daily newspaper of record definitely underscores the point. But SF Weekly produced these sorts of stories not as a special occasion or a one-off, but on a weekly basis. San Francisco remains a deeply corrupt and dysfunctional place.

It is, increasingly, a struggle to merely tread water in this town. Nobody has time to take a breath anymore. Including, in the end, the journalists. There is no substitute for the editorial freedom accorded an alt-weekly reporter; there is no substitute for the emphasis placed on to-the-point truth-telling, deep reportage, and writing with panache. Journalism, already too much the province of people who can work badly paid or unpaid internships and spend a fortune for a graduate school degree — for which a few years at an alt-weekly was a far more economical substitution — will grow ever more exclusive.

This is a major bummer. Guess which paper just got stuffed. Broke-Ass Stuart is an actual human being named Stuart Schuffman, who had just started a semi-monthly column at the Weekly after the new ownership group switched his Examiner column to the Weekly two months ago. So he would be one of the pink slip recipients here. San Francisco no longer has an alt-weekly. During the 3 years I worked here the threat of closure constantly loomed over our fierce tiny team, but we poured our hearts into creating the best alt-weekly we could.

So sad for the existing staff and brilliant freelancers. What a loss. The Weekly is yet another victim of larger media challenges, which have felt especially acute in the San Francisco Bay Area — whose newspapers, alt-weeklies and other news sources have been subject to all manner of mergers , shutdowns and consolidations within the past decade.

Last month , longtime music site the Bay Bridged announced that it would shut down operations in October. The paper won a California News Publishers Association award in for Nuala Bishari's devastating look into the elders killed and left missing in the wake of the Paradise Fire. Eskenazi, Bishari, Ruskin and many others in the Bay Area media landscape mourned the alt-weekly's shutdown.