Having long railed against Bay Area news publishers for essentially ignoring an abundance of important stories and demanding readers in favor of Wine Country ad supplements and lurid screaming headlines, I read with some interest the following item, about the NY Times and Wall Street Journal’s plans for Bay Area editions:

Both The Journal and The Times seem to be betting that the Bay Area is the place to try first. Its biggest newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News, have suffered through some of the sharpest downsizing in the industry, and a very high percentage of the region’s residents moved from elsewhere, which usually means less attachment to the local paper.

I mean, how can a publisher, in a market it essentially owned, let it all slip away?

Maybe by … ignoring the stories that matter, and firing the reporters that do their best work?

The Chronicle fired (er, laid off? bought out?) environment reporter Jane Kay — Jane Kay! — the steroids-in-baseball-busting Lance Williams and superstar foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen …

Somehow — how, though, seriously, how? — these five-star newsroom professionals were viewed as liabilities in the Chronicle’s struggle for survival.

And now the news heavyweights are moving in. SFGate.com will do fine as a source for local lifestyle information (movies, restaurants, etc.) plus crime reporting and occasional City Hall columns, but can Hearst compete as a serious local news outlets given the devastation of the SF Chron’s reporting capacity? Let me note the Gate has already begun direct-linking to other outlets’ coverage of important stories they lack the firepower to cover.

And how does the Examiner fit in? Sure, they have a knack for punchy and succinct coverage of local news, but can they even give away wood pulp sporting 50-point morning headlines about major news items people learned about online the night before?

As ye sow, so shall ye reap, or something like that.

I have a little hobby, tracking how the SF Chronicle covers chemical spills. Usually, it doesn’t cover them at all beyond a simple “when and where” blurb … and not even, usually, the what of it, beyond “chemicals.”

This always kind of honked me off. Why would the Chron never seek to inform its readers more effectively as to what’s been spilled, how it got there, and its potential health impacts?

In fact, I resigned from SFGate.com precisely because it wasn’t deemed of value to create a public health page on the site dedicated to that kind of information.

Fast-forward eight or so years, and, my jaw drops in astonishment: There, on the front page of SFGate.com, is a link to a detailed breakdown of the nature and health impacts of annhydrous ammonia, which, earlier that day, had erupted out of a salami plant in South San Francisco.

So where’s the rub? The coverage of the chemical was by a blogger, not a regular member of the SF Chronicle’s salaried reporting staff.

I’m very glad the Chron has given this platform to bloggers, who are apparently free to post the material they feel is important — and kudos to Doc Gurley for having the foresight to consider that people may want to know what’s spilling into their community, and what it does.

The Chron’s coverage itself, by Henry K. Lee, an otherwise hardworking reporter on the disaster beat, is typical: The time and the place of the spill is duly reported. The name of the chemical is mentioned, as well as its use in refrigeration — a nice change from the old days when euphemisms like “swimming pool chemicals” were used instead of “chlorine.”

We also learn when the salami plant moved to SSF, and that a decontamination facility was set up. But that’s it. You want to know what, exactly, anhydrous ammonia is, how it affects human life, etc., you’re outta luck.

While Gurley’s blog did make up for that grievous omission, that blog is unusual — a bone thrown to the changing media landscape, rather than a meaningful investment by the newspaper as a matter of policy in how it covers its community in print AND online.

It’s a glaring example of exactly how inattentive San Francisco’s major metro daily is, that a freelance blogger — rather than its paid and editorially vetted reporting staff — would nail the important details of a story of considerable interest to the health and well-being of the whole San Francisco Bay Area.

Is it really all about courting and serving the overlooked working class?

There’s enough conventional wisdom out there about the success of “niche” print publications. Now, take a listen to On The Media’s March 13 interview with El Diaro-La Prensa editor Alberto Vourvoulias.

In it, he reframes the whole discussion — of why he’s selling wood-pulp while newspaper’s nationwide are basically going out of business — around serving communities, delivering quality, and, in general, working to be relevant to a working-class audience that is overlooked by “mainstream” mass media.

He has an added advantage in that much of his immigrant audience may simply not be as “wired” — and thus more inclined to BUY wood pulp — as the more moneyed citizenry that has up till now been the primary focus on newspapers seeking added value for their advertisers, and now simply logs on to the Internet to get the news for free.

Still, compare the basic issue of relevance to the San Francisco Chronicle losing a million dollars per week, enabling Hearst to threaten to shutter it unless the union rolls over and accepts massive newsroom cuts.

Beside the fact that the Chronicle is giving all its content away for free online, can it be that what the SF Chronicle has committed to printing simply isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on?

Would the SF Chronicle actually be doing better if its editors more aggressively courted a widespread audience interested in, for example, labor issues and public health, as opposed to expensive restaurant reviews and snarky pop-culture writing?

Newsdesk.org, The San Francisco Public Press and the Knight Foundation-supported SPOT.US “crowdfunding” project are teaming up to raise $2,500 to support investigative coverage and fact-checking of San Francisco-focused election advertisements. Your micro-donation will make a difference!

Pledge for SF Election Ad Fact-Checking

* THE NEED
Help shine a light on the murky world of election advertising! The ads, mailers, and phone calls are already trickling in, but soon you’ll be deluged by a flood of innuendo, deceptive messaging and dubious facts from a variety of special-interest front organizations, pumped at you via snail-mail, e-mail, the phone, TV and radio.

Can you trust what you’re being told? Can you count on local media to make sense of it all? Sadly, no. Far more money is being spent to influence your behavior than to help you make informed decisions at the voting booth.

In fact, GradeTheNews.org found in 2004 that Bay Area TV news averaged just 1 minute 24 seconds nightly covering ballot initiatives, but ran 2 minutes 41 seconds of paid advertising for those initiatives. We can do better than that!

Pledge Your Support for SF Election Ad Fact-Checking

* THE PROJECT
To help cut through the hype, Newsdesk.org is teaming up with SPOT.US to publish a weekly investigative report on San Francisco-focused campaign advertisements, running from Labor Day through Election Day.

Pledge Your Support for SF Election Ad Fact-Checking

If you are a San Francisco voter, your pledge of $25 will help us meet our funding goal, and hire a professional reporter to provide weekly investigative coverage and fact-checking of election ads, running from Labor Day through Election Day. These reports will run for free on Newsdesk.org, and will be made available for free to any media partners who wish to use them.

Our goal is to help SF residents sort out the barrage of influence advertising, and make truly informed decisions at the voting booth — from the candidates to the ballot initiatives and propositions.

* HOW IT WORKS *
Spot.Us is raising the funds, Newsdesk.org will be producing the coverage. Microphilanthropy uses social networks to aggregate a large amount of small donations to achieve a particular funding goal. Once the funding has been raised — we’re at 10% of our target — the money will be released to the reporter tapped for the job.

* ABOUT NEWSDESK.org *
Since 2000, Newsdesk.org has led commercial mass media with groundbreaking, nonpoliticized coverage of veterans’ health care and PTSD; the 2004 presidential election and the 2003 San Francisco mayoral runoff; the energy industry in the developing world; genetically engineered agriculture, and much more. Newsdesk also is the producer of News You Might Have Missed, a unique source for important but overlooked news from around the world, published every Wednesday since February 2002.

* ABOUT THE PUBLIC PRESS *
The San Francisco Public Press is a new nonprofit local news organization whose aim is to increase the coverage of important but under-covered news topics through a daily print newspaper and the Web. The paper will stress government and private-sector accountability, consumer protection and issues of social inequality. We are developing a business model unique in the newspaper world, balancing subscription revenue with public-broadcasting-style pledges and philanthropy.

I have provided media and campaign advice to San Francisco mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi, and as a journalist and editor, this raises a few questions.

One the one hand, that means I cannot credibly provide “fair and balanced” coverage of the 2007 election.

On the other, what does this say about the rest of the San Francisco media establishment?

Consider: The city’s leading — or at least highest profile — newspaper is brazenly partisan in its support of the incumbent, running a sumptuous profile of Gavin Newsom, and so far offering no similar treatment in print to his opponents beyond describing them as a “cast of characters” and a “bad joke” in a pair of collective profile articles.

Interestingly, back on Sept. 6, CW Nevius (noted in these pages for his recent, front-page screeds against the homeless), decried the anointing of Newsom as the certain winner of the race; yet none of his Chron colleagues have taken him up on his call for “a vigorous airing of the issues, a debate on policy, and a clear-eyed look at the candidates.”

In fact, less than two weeks out from the election, the SFGate.com front page doesn’t even link to its rather disorganized elections page (where the lead item today is about 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani) — and in a headline earlier this week referred to the entire slate of candidates as “Gavin and the 11 Dwarves.”

This provokes serious doubts about the entire notion of fairness and balance in the commercial-media mainstream, at least in San Francisco.

How this can be “solved,” I will address a bit further along in this essay.

But: Keeping in mind that one of America’s most highly regarded journalists, Mr. Bill Moyers, was once the press secretary for President Lyndon Baines Johnson, I have decided that it really is OK for me — as a partisan of the arts and a reformed entertainment editor — to provide advice to a professional clown who knows he can’t win, but who nonetheless seeks to advance dialogue about San Francisco’s arts, culture and sustainability policies.

* * * * *
That advice, by the way, amounts to one dinner meeting as part of his “brain trust,” and a few email exchanges, in which I exhorted him a) to invite Mayor Newsom on a fact-finding tour of Amsterdam to study the Dutch approach to homelessness and “victimless crimes,” and, b) to summarize his campaign positions in bullet points and send them to the Chronicle, which had sought them for publication.

Chicken ignored those pearls of wisdom, stating that a) he wanted to advance his case for “a city of art and innovation,” not confront Newsom, and that b) the Chron was insincere in its offer, and only throwing a bone to public participation to keep up appearances.

He turned out to be right on that one. None of the candidates’ positions were ever intended for print in the newspaper itself, and can’t even be accessed from the Web site’s front page, but rather are buried in the aforementioned depths of its elections section, far from the eyes of the daily news browser.

The issue gets deeper still, however, and really, this particular rant isn’t about the Chronicle. It’s about me. And capital-J Journalism as an ideal and aspiration.

Walk with me, then, for a while …

* * * * *
In 2003, Matt Gonzalez made headlines with a near-miss run for mayor against his fellow member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, Gavin Newsom.

It was a heated campaign, amidst which Newsdesk.org conducted extensive interviews with both candidates, asking identical sets of questions, and arguably going more in-depth on the issues than any other Bay Area media outlet.

Fast-forward to summer 2007. Mayor Newsom is running for his second term, and in the polls is far ahead of the opposition.

Speculation is rife throughout the city, however, that Gonzalez is girding himself for a comeback. He’s making the rounds, meeting local community groups, and gauging their receptivity for another go at City Hall’s top job.

One such group was the Abundance League, a fabulous conversation salon focusing on social and cultural transformation, of which I am a member.

It was a bit of a dilemma for me to attend.

One the one hand, I wanted to cover the race as we did in 2003. Thus far, local media had largely anointed Newsom and ignored his opponents, which was and remains a dreadful breach of journalistic responsibility to sustain vigorous public participation.

An astute observer would consider that one hell of a news hole, ready for the filling — and there at the Abundance League was the race’s dark horse, in the flesh.

However, Newsdesk.org has no resources for serious campaign coverage right now. I was in no position to do additional reporting on the current mayoral race.

And, as Gonzalez was primarily interested in opinion and guidance about whether he should run against Newsom, I decided to keep my distance, and exited the meeting in the opening moments of the conversation.

In retrospect, considering my later support for Chicken, and considering the ongoing mayoral partisanship of the mainstream and alternative press here in town, I probably could have stayed and chatted with Gonzalez all night.

But I don’t want to be friends with politicians.

I don’t even want to be collegial with them.

There’s a glamour and charisma to these people that is entrancing, and as a reporter, you gotta keep your guard up.

And as a voter, too. Ask tough questions of them, and yourself, and the press that delivers you the facts. Above all, don’t believe the hype.

Chicken, for example, has some brash and fresh talk on arts and greenwashing, is witty to the point of being hilarious, can charm the socks off a shoe-store mannequin, and is a damn snappy dresser. But he’s also a loudmouth, alienates people, and freely confesses that he doesn’t have all the answers.

Snake oil or straight-talker?

Politicians and carnies are frighteningly similar, if you think about it.

So boot up those brain cells before punching out the proverbial chad, brothers and sisters, and hold your media and your candidates equally accountable.

* * * * *
And we, the media, must too hold ourselves accountable.

Consider: I have plenty of opinions about local politics and issues — globally, nationally, and where I live, my home town of 15 years, San Francisco.

How, then, do I handle the ethics concern of covering issues I care about with fairness, not to mention a little grace?

Well, certainly not through “objectivity,” a sacred cow of the journalism world long overdue for ritual slaughter — and not just because it can be falsified to mask hidden (and not so hidden) agendas, but also because, as Brent Cunningham argued in the Columbia Journalism Review, devotion to objectivity can “make us [journalists] passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it.”

The solution advanced by the advocacy-journalism community — namely, disclaim your bias and express your viewpoint with vigor — is legitimate enough, but entirely unsatisfactory to me, personally.

Why? Because it closes doors to other readers or news-seekers who do not share your opinion.

Because journalism as I idealize it needs to provide EVERY reader with the chance to educate themselves fully, and make up their own minds.

I would propose that a real solution to the problem of bias in journalism is as follows:

• Full disclosure of potential influences on one’s reporting (which I have done here)
• A standards-driven approach to coverage of sensitive issues that enforces, through strict methodology, the daily practice of fairness and accuracy in coverage
• A fully functional online interface that enables the Internet community to continue developing its role as “at-large ombudsmans” for a given news outlet (i.e., welcome to the blogosphere, darlings)
• A mechanism by which reporters or editors with genuine conflicts of interest — such as ties to a candidate during election season — would address the conflict by recusing themselves from covering the topic, to be replaced by qualified staffers selected by an oversight board

By this reckoning (and if Newsdesk.org had a budget to actually do any coverage right now) I would absent myself from the SF 2007 mayoral election beat (and any other race that Chicken participates in), and my replacement would be selected by, say, the Newsdesk advisory board, or the local SPJ chapter.

* * * * *
The fact is, I could write a totally evenhanded, very in-depth article on the whole campaign, and never emit a whiff of bias, overt or covert.

This is surely true of any decent journalist who, being human and prone to any number of opinions, nonetheless gives the upper hand to her or his sense of reportorial duty.

However, if you have a reporter who is NOT decent enough to be fair and accurate when covering a topic they care about, but who is good enough to hide that bias, the problem of false objectivity returns with a vengeance.

So the methodological approach to preventing this is invaluable, and should be both respected and protected.

In that light, I’m probably also not the best guy to cover arts or transport policies. I’m an activist in both those arenas — through my work with Independent Arts & Media in the former case, and as a Critical Mass rider, op-ed writer and essayist in the latter.

Though I’ll write you one heck of an op-ed on either topic, if you like.

What do you think? Please advise. This is complex and emotional territory, and above all, I want to do the right thing.

p.s. Chicken John for mayor.