Nancy Pelosi Goes To Bat To Keep Bay Area Newspapers Alive

San Francisco Chronicle:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, worried about the fate of The Chronicle and other financially struggling newspapers, urged the Justice Department Monday to consider giving Bay Area papers more leeway to merge or consolidate business operations to stay afloat.

Read the whole story: San Francisco Chronicle

Comments

[newyorkid]

10:05 PM on 03/17/2009

There was a famous song titled "Video kiIIed the radio star" which erroneously predicted the VCR would wipe out the radio industry. Well, someone could predict that the Internet would wipe out MSM and make a song titled "Blogging kiIIed the MSM p_ropagandist". Pelosi is trying to save the status quo of MSM.

[ztower]

07:14 PM on 03/17/2009

Here's a thought...make the newspapers interesting and we'll buy them. Maybe Huffpo could buy the SF Chronicle and give it a life.

Supply and demand, Nancy...you can't make us want it.

[dillydawg]

05:27 PM on 03/17/2009

She is just doing her job and a good one at that.

[tokenconservative]

04:11 PM on 03/17/2009

The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing just fine - says something about the oversaturation of hyper-liberal newspapers.

[Gasparilla]

04:45 PM on 03/17/2009

Uh, yeah. The same paper that said everything's fine. Keep buying those bank stocks. Don't let those panicky liberals get you down.

[Emlyn]

09:29 PM on 03/18/2009

What hyper-liberal newspapers? I don't know of one. Most of them are hyper-conservative.

[AnnfromCA]

03:21 PM on 03/17/2009

It's very scary for some of us regarding the failure of the newspapers.

This, to me.....is the end of Democracy.

Seriously.

It's that scary.

But, I've always understood that news was also business.

I just never thought I'd have to live through the demise of real democracy.

I think a lot of you don't get the significance of this.

This blog? It generates probably 2 real news stories daily.

That's it.

It links to newspapers for the rest.

That goes?

So does this blog style.

[Gasparilla]

03:50 PM on 03/17/2009

That's the irony here. You have people on here saying let the papers go, while commenting on a story from a....newspaper? What we could end up is some horror show like USA Today, some bland nothing. As I have pointed out also, local in depth reporting will go away. The only local news will be what someone picks up from the police reports. Bank robbed, traffic accident kills two. No "online" paper is going to pay a reporter to go down to the courthouse to sift through records that can reveal a political scandal.

[Bigunsmom]

03:19 PM on 03/17/2009

Botox Pop Up Pelosi needs to go along with all the left wing liberal newspapers.

[joshuahmcdonald]

03:00 PM on 03/17/2009

Print media is nearly dead...let's simply pull the plug and pay our respects.

I can't help but feel like so many of our economic problems have to do with our inability to understand that capitalism is only truly bad when we:
a) compensate people for providing no value to the system and
b) hang on to antiquated technologies and business practices well beyond their expiration date

We should be happily pioneering new media and stop mourning the loss of an idea whose time has come and gone. Sure, change is hard...but that doesn't make it wrong...or unnecessary.

[Gasparilla]

04:00 PM on 03/17/2009

You're comparing newspapers to buggy whips. A free press informing us is not the same thing as any old product.

[joshuahmcdonald]

08:55 PM on 03/17/2009

NO! I believe strongly in the free press, just not in the outdated mechanism of delivery that is the print media. We can not do away with the press, and anyone who desires that needs to be chastised thoroughly...that is not me. But the newspaper itself IS any old product. I am as well informed as the average American, if not more so, and I have not read a newspaper in paper form in more than 5 years. The reason that the papers are failing is not their content nor their purpose but their failure to adjust to a steady decline in the demand for the physical delivery mechanism.

[harriettubman]

12:59 AM on 03/18/2009

Goodbye slanted stories too. I was tired of reading stories slanted by how someone was raised. If a white reporter writes about ethnic stories, they're usually biased with half the truth missing.

[jlab]

02:04 PM on 03/17/2009

What is it that gives Nancy this look of perpetual surprise? Her job, the botox, or both?

[harriettubman]

01:59 PM on 03/17/2009

Only Nancy. She's ruined CA to the tune of billions and she has the Democratic party right behind her. What a waste having her as the first female speaker of the house. Somone else should've gotten that position.Spend, spend, spend, spend is her motto.

[kepary]

01:47 PM on 03/17/2009

let them go .. if the people want them the people will buy them... nancy just wants her free advertising

[Beachrunner]

01:46 PM on 03/17/2009

Save the trees! Close the SF Chronicle!

[FrankensteinBlack]

01:20 PM on 03/17/2009

HEY NEWSPAPER DUDES! WANNA SURVIVE IN THIS INSTANT NEWS ELECTRONIC AGE? Well, get off of you antiquated keasters and create a kindle like device (i.e. Amazon’s Kindle only bigger but) using flexible OLED technology. Imagine if I can roll up or fold a piece of tech that get constantly updated newspaper feeds from papers around the country that I subscribe too? Talk to Sony. They have the tech NOW and it aint rocket science! So, why are you still sitting there reading my rant? Don't wait. Posse up with other newspapers around the country and GO GET ER DONE! Your survival depends on it!

[Apollonavigator]

01:16 PM on 03/17/2009

Why don't you run the story about Pelos demanding that her jet be repositioned from San Francisco Int. to Travis Air Force Base in Solano county because it's closer to her Napa Valley vacation home.
I thought we were all supposed to help out the economy. Apparently not the queen.
I'm sure that if a repub pulled a stunt like that it would be headlines in red.
Thankfully the Air Force said no, although I'm sure some Colonel's evaluations will be affected. Too bad.

[sarabono]

01:00 PM on 03/17/2009

Where is the Sierra Club and the Calif. Natural Resources Board on this one?

They both should be for the demise of newspapers!

Just look at all the trees that will be saved,all that toxic ink that won't be put into the ecosystem and all that gasoline that won't be used delivering those filthy things.!

[doctorwang]

03:30 PM on 03/17/2009

- valid points to bring up.

[amdezurik]

12:45 PM on 03/17/2009

Not sure on other papers but the Chron has done this to themselves. For me i began to not bother to buy it when they started an endless series of id.iot.ic changes to the paper. they took one of my favorite writers off the "back page" and buried him inside. And put full page ads on that page. I promised myself to never look at them and if i did see who they were for to never buy from them. tehy they raised their price 50% without notice. And now they have gone to a modified USA Today format, which is bad enough for USA Today but makes the Chron pretty much unreadable.