I missed this fact about the pay-to-read as well. It’s kind of hilarious to be asked to pay tomorrow to read something that’s not quite worth reading for free today. The New York Times might be able to get away with that, but this paper is nowhere near that class (sorry to say). Personally I have the sense that the Chronicle’s continued existence is holding local journalism back. Civilians aren’t aware there is a problem; they figure, there’s the Chronicle, here since 1865, so it must be doing an adequate job. When in fact it’s barely doing the job at all.

But this is a big part of why newspapers are failing. They have been cutting reporting staffs and wiping out institutional memory since the early 1990s and no longer can cover news the way it needs to be covered in a fast changing world. By continuing to fire staffers to "save money" and regard reporting as an expensive proposition best left to the wire services, newspapers have been gutting out the very thing they’re supposed to do. These American MBA types know only one thing – fire staff – to make a short term gain, and have done nothing on the revenue side to change things.

as it stands, I as the reader and concerned citizen am being asked by newspapers to pay more and more for a paper that’s shrinking, offers little in the way of the news I rely on to make decisions about who to vote for and what’s really going on around town, and as such, I no longer buy the Chron. I was an avid Mercury reader but now there’s no reason to buy it – I can get all the wire service copy at AP’s website instead. Also, newspapers have ALWAYS been a high-overhead/low profit margin business, it was because they were essentially monopolies that they stayed in business. Wall Street never got that memo, and demand high rates of return for a business that is never going to produce triple digit gains every year.

I would be happy to pay for a news service that did local news reporting, but I’m not going to pay for a crippled news operation that fires its senior talent because they are "expensive". One good reporter beats out a pack of untrained, part timers, and if someone’s hiring those kinds of folks, then I’ll be happy to buy their product and support their advertisers.