By Bruce B. Brugmann

Click here for the Guardian editorial Reilly's Victory

Click here for the Guardian story Beyond the Reilly settlement

I was glad that I went to the Clint Reilly press conference April 23 and saw for myself what Reilly and his attorney Joe Alioto won in their historic settlement with Hearst and Singleton and just how the two monopolizing newspaper chains would cover the story about their own monopolizing moves. This was a crucial litmus test for them and their pleas that this was all their way of staying alive and "competitive."

In a phrase, the coverage of the chains (and their Gannett and Stephens chain partners) was lousy and confirmed the essential Reilly point: that they weren't competitive chains and that they couldn't be trusted to cover such a big local story about themselves or each other.

When I was asked by a reporter for my opinion of the settlement, I sat down and battled out my comment quickly:
"I think Reilly again performed a major journalistic and public service by taking on a tough and expensive antitrust case that neither the Bill Lockyer/Jerrry Brown AG's office or the George Bush/Alberto Gonzales U.S. Department of Justice wouldn't touch. I think it was a major feat that he accomplished what he did: (a) expose the Hearst/Singleton documents of collaboration and secrecy; (b) force a public and journalistic debate on the issue of regional monopoly, and (c) force Hearst and Singleton to rescind their secret collaboration and investment agreements and force them to compete for the duration.

"Wouldn't it have been simply awful if no one had come forward to blow the whistle on the secret moves of the nation's biggest chains, headed by conservative publishers from Denver and New York, to kill daily competition and impose regional monopoly on one of the most liberal and civilized regions in the world? Wouldn't it have been simply awful if someone, like the Guardian, Media Alliance, and the First Amendment Project, hadn't come forward to sue and blow the whistle on the monopolizers working secretly to lock up the Bay Area and then suppress the documents of collaboration in the federal antitrust case?"

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Yesterday, when I was going back and forth with my source in Contra Costa County on how Singleton papers covered the Reilly settlement story in the East Bay, he mentioned that Murdoch had made an unsolicited bid to buy the Wall Street Journal. My source, a natural born news junkie, monitors breaking news during the day. I leafed through my copy of the Journal and couldn't find any such story and promptly forgot about it.

This morning, opening up the Journal, I found that the paper played the story as its lead on the front page, under a two column headline, "Murdoch's Surprise Bid: $5 Billion for Dow Jones, High-Premium Offer Spotlights the Family That Controls Publisher." Unlike the Hearst and Singleton press, which used the bury and mangle approach to its big media stories involving their own monopoly deal, the Journal played the story as the big story it was.

The front page story jumped to a full page inside the first section. And a front page box titled "In the Headlines" listed three inside stories: "Murdoch sees digital future" and "Bancroft family holds control through dual-class stock" and
"Offer reflects lofty premium for a strategic property." There was also a chronology box, "From Handwritten to Online: l25 Years of Journalism," on the front page of the "Money and Investing section" along with two major stories.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday May 23, as I was preparing my introductory remarks for our third annual small business awards ceremony at Anchor Steam Brewery, I found a timely article buried in that day's business page of the San Francisco Chronicle that helped illustrate what I call the Chronicle's "Let's be fair to PG&E" news principle.

The article, I pointed out, reported on a major $l5,000 study that was specially commissioned by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance and provided valuable ammunition to independents in their endless battle with the chain stores. The study was made available exclusively to the Chronicle in hopes that the paper would do a major story, play it up, and give the small business community a much needed boost to a large number of readers.
It was timed for Small Business Week San Francisco 2007 (May 5-12), but the Chronicle was more interested in putting out a special ad supplement with no mention of the study, stuffed with deadly proclamations and boilerplate. Significantly, there were virtually no ads from small business. The rates were too high and the format too boring.

Instead, I noted, the Chronicle, owned by the Hearst chain out of New York and a champion of big business and big development and big chains, gave the story its patented "Let's be fair to PG&E" approach or in this case "Let's be fair to the chains." The Chronicle buried the story in its prime burial plot at the bottom of the right hand page of the business section where it buries stories it doesn't like: for example, the Reilly story on his settlement with the Hearst and Singleton chains, which we called a Reilly victory because he forced the chains to compete (see Guardian coverage and other blogs.)

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Carl Nolte is the Chronicle writer who I think is the carrier of the Herb Caen tradition of finding soul in San Francisco.

Carl confirmed this for me in his Saturday May 5 Chronicle story aptly headlined "Gorgeous houses with 'soul.'" Carl, who was born and raised on Potrero Hill and is now hunkered down in a house on Bernal Heights, wrote about Arthur Bloomfield, a 76-year old retired music and food critic for the old Hearst Examiner, and his passion for the stately mansions and Victorian houses of Pacific Heights.

Bloomfeld took Carl on a tour of Pacific Heights for a book that he and his late wife Anne wrote, "Gables and Fables: a Portrait of San Francisco's Pacific Heights." He told Carl that "houses can have soul, you know. Like a good concert or a good meal, something like a house can be exciting and have soul."

I know that Bloomfeld and his wife knew about San Francisco soul, even though I never met them. My wife Jean and I, and our two children, shared for years with the Bloomfelds a wonderful housekeeper named Rose Zelalich. She was a lady with real San Francisco soul. She was born six months before the earthquake and taken by her Yugoslav parents to live in a tent in Golden Gate Park. She never left San Francisco and had endless fascinating stories about her life in the city's neighborhoods, the families she worked for, her two children and grandchildren, her cast of character friends, and her favorite haunts like Adeline's Bakery in West Portal and Woolworth's on Market Street.
She claimed that, if you couldn't find it at Woolworth's or the Emporium across Market Street, you didn't need it. She was a Democrat with a Big D and loved FDR and hated William Buckley Jr.

Last year more than 100 journalists were killed while on reporting duty, making it the bloodiest year on record for journalism, according to IPI’s statistics.
Of the 100 journalists killed last year, forty-eight were killed in the Middle East and North Africa alone. 46 of which were killed in Iraq, once again proving Iraq to be the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

I am off to an assembly for the International Press Institute (IPI), an international free press organization, meeting in Istanbul. We'll soon be starting a special section called Journalists Under Fire that will feature communiques and alerts from IPI and other international press organizations involving suppression of journalists in countries all over the world.
Here is the latest press release from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) concerning the recent murder of three journalists in Iraq.

UPDATE: The Weekly finanlly ran a shortened version of this letter May 23.

This is a letter I sent over to the SF Weekly last week in response to a story on the Reilly lawsuit settlement. Somehow, the Weekly couldn't manage to get the letter into print, so we're posting it here on the Bruce Blog:

To the Weekly: (for publication as a letter to the editor in the next edition: since the Weekly and apparently all VVM papers have blocked emails from the Guardian, I am sending this by fax and by hand)

In my Bruce/B3 blog at SFBG.com commenting on the Reilly victory in his Hearst/Singleton antitrust case, I wrote that a reporter had asked me for comment on the settlement of the litigation.

The reporter was Michael Stoll and he told me in an email that he was doing a piece on the settlement for the "SUCKA FREE CITY" page for the SF Weekly/New Times/VVM chain paper. I purposely didn't identify the reporter or the column (appropriately named) or the paper because I didn't think the Weekly would run my comments that I had quickly written up and sent to him by email. Then I wrote my Weekly comments in my blog.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

CNN today was drumming on with news of Tony Blair going and Gordon Brown coming in as prime minister of Great Britain. The Turkish Press was reporting that the national elections here had been moved up three months to July 22, and this surprised the political parties, who were alarmed and said they were forced to bring in the professionals to help them carry on effective campaigns during the short period left before the election. The Turkish Daily News, Turkey’s English daily, reported that there was no space left on the TV stations or on the billboards and that campaign ads would be competing with ice cream manufacturers.
On the plane coming in, Spiro Vryonis sat next to associate pubublisher Jean Dibble and filled her in on the elections from his perspective as a Byzantine scholar. Vryonis, retired director of the center for the study of Hellenism in Sacramento, told her that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan supported his Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul for president. “They get along like two dogs until someone throws a bone between them,” he said.
Meanwhile, I found good advice in Time Out Istanbul, the city-living guide in English. It wrote about the art of Keyif, which translates as “a pleasurable state of idle relaxation.” The article said that Keyif has been honed down to an art form by the Trurks and laid out 10 ways of experiencing Keyif the Turkish way. My favorite was the idea of walking aimlessly along the Bosthorus, the body of water seperating Asia from Europe. It said that “you’ll be surprised how relaxing the Oriental art of walking around with no destination is.” The 58th International Press Institute world congress and general assembly starts tomorrow. So I think I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon doing Keyif. B3