San Francisco Bay Guardian Shuts Down

Slate has the obituary:

Another alt-weekly is dead. But this one wasn’t just another alt-weekly. It was the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the most venerable, staunchly independent, and defiantly weird of America’s great alternative weekly newspapers. The paper, founded in 1966, is shutting down for “financial reasons,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday. The decision was made by San Francisco Media Co., the parent company that bought it in 2012 from its founder, Bruce Brugmann. “It is the hardest decision I’ve had to make in my 20-year newspaper career,” the San Francisco Media Co.’s publisher, Glenn Zuehls, said in a statement. A notice on the Bay Guardian’s website says the final issue will be published on Wednesday, although one of the paper's fired leaders vowed to SFist that it will "live on in some form." The loss of the paper in its current incarnation may not deal a great blow to San Francisco. The Guardian, like many alt-weeklies, had been sliding for years as readers and local advertisers turned from print media to the Web. Over the decades, though, the Guardian as an institution had come to stand for something more than just convenient concert listings, seamy classified ads, and snarky coverage of the local political scene. It was an embodiment of a certain vision of the city—a vision of San Francisco as a haven for artists, immigrants, eccentrics, hobos, bohos, gays and lesbians, and any extant members of that perennially endangered species, the local working-class family.

Read the full final issue online.