Navigating the Existential Fragility of Online News Archives

https://www.projectcensored.org/unplugging-news-history-in-san-francisco/

Nov. 14, By Peter Byrne

Reporters are tasked with wading into the maelstroms of current events — fires, hurricanes, battle spaces, crime scenes, accidents, political riots — to record what we see, to print, televise, and preserve stories of events in the world as viewed through our professional lensing.

Hence the adage, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”

Flawed, biased, and duplicitous as contemporary journalism can be as it wanders the political spectrum, remembered, spoken, carved, and written news accounts have been the first drafts of history since time immemorial.

Historians have long recognized the importance of mining news archives for information and context, which is why, in the previous century, libraries made space for indexed, bound volumes of newspapers and magazines as aides for exploring the past.

To reduce the cost of storage, newsprint was increasingly archived on often blurry, illegible microfiche, and libraries destroyed paper originals, as Nicholson Baker documented a quarter century ago in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Then along came the internet transformation of news from print to digital presentation and storage. Unlike solid paper or microfiche records, electronic archives can be liquidated with the toggle of a switch. Not only are online news archives vulnerable to destruction for reasons of cost-saving or rewriting history — that destruction is actually occurring.

At the turn of the millennium, Craigslist and corporatized social media were deflating advertiser-based newspaper business models, even as journalists enthused about new abilities to gather troves of information at light speed and to be read by anyone with a computer modem. Our first drafts of history would be eternally accessible in cyberspace, preserved forever as infinitely storable electrons, or so we thought.

Sadly, there are considerable costs for digitally storing the firehose of reported news. And preserving historical evidence is not a priority for profit-seeking publishers who are wired to regard the news as brain bait, political weaponry, a commodity, and a frame for attracting advertising revenue, which is the primary purpose of corporate media.

As advertisers migrated towards online media and the universe of newspapers accordingly shrank, billionaires and necrophiliac private equity investment firms bought up “traditional” and “alternative” newspapers, merging multiple media “properties” into online formats whilst ditching the high costs of newsprint and investigative and foreign affairs reporting. Financiers dictated editorial and “content” policies from afar; fired armies of reporters, editors, and support staff; drastically slimmed the size of the daily and weekly “books;” and off-loaded electronic archives to commercial third parties or the trash bin.

For the most part, the international newspaper industry has largely abandoned the pursuit of solid journalism and pivoted to selling what I call NEWZ™ or advertising or political spin disguised as journalism, also known as native advertising and branded content—hardly trustworthy drafts of history.

News cemeteries

The New York Times and a few national dailies have monetized their news archival search functions back to the (First) Civil War, and some libraries selectively curate digital news archives and databases. And there are pay-to-play resources such as NewspaperArchive, a graveyard of local, mostly corporatized newspapers. But that useful national archive does not contain alternative weeklies such as the SF Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Bay Area Reporter, Metro Silicon Valley, Pacific Sun, or North Mission News, journalistic stalwarts that reported decades of civic history but are now vanishing online.

Founded in 1981, the SF Weekly had long maintained a solid mix of take-no-prisoners investigative reporting, long-form cultural and political features, music and film reviews, and profiles of scientists and entertainers. At the turn of the millennium, the weekly edition clocked in at more than 200 pages and was freely available on city street corners—and it was influential.

Today, the formerly comprehensive online archive of the SF Weekly has about 95 percent vanished, leaving behind random links to a smattering of stories that present the illusion of an archive. Missing is most of 40 years of weekly investigative and cultural feature reporting and, unsurprisingly, a 2001 profile of the SF Weekly’s new owner, a real estate investor and political candidate named Clint Reilly with a known antipathy towards the press.

That profile is widely regarded as having forever ruined Reilly’s chance of gaining elected office. And its censorship has everything to do with the decline of journalism in San Francisco. But, first, some historical context.

San Francisco news desert

In a city once bristling with scores of morning and afternoon and non-English language newspapers, today’s news offerings in San Francisco approach zero. A handful of nonprofit news sites with a bare-bones staff, such as Mission Local and 48 Hills, attempt to hold power accountable, but they are outgunned by the NEWZ, which includes San Francisco Chronicle, SF Examiner, and nearly 200 television and radio stations controlled by corporate advertising.

The glossy online San Francisco Standard is owned and operated by Silicon Valley billionaire investor Michael Moritz—enough said. San Francisco Chronicle is owned by international business conglomerate Hearst Corporation, which strives, as it always has, to dominate local power plays with politically agendized news reporting—endless diatribes about the horrors of consumers being forced to step around houseless campers even as the planet burns amidst capitalist-generated genocides, perfectly habitable office towers are left empty, police sell drugs and rampage the poor, and city bureaucrats unabashedly line their pockets while the NEWZ whistles Dixie and sips fine wines at Gavin Newsom’s Balboa Café.

Exacerbating the demise of journalism in San Francisco, in December 2020, the SF Weekly and San Francisco Examiner were purchased from a Canada-based media conglomerate by Reilly, a former political consultant who owns a portfolio of downtown office towers.

At the time of the sale, Reilly said, “I learned during my 25 years as a political consultant how important strong journalism is to a functioning democracy, and it has never been more critical than it is today.”

A year later, Reilly fired the SF Weekly staff and transformed its website into an advertising adjunct to the print-online hybrid Examiner, itself a faint shadow of a once-renowned daily. In Reilly’s meager publications, “news” and advertising are consumable as synergetic and indistinguishable commodities: NEWZ. Clint Reilly Communications also owns Nob Hill Gazette, a mirror for Pacific Heights socialites like himself.

Before Reilly bought the SF Weekly, its online archive was historically complete and easily searchable; it is now a ghost. Today, one cannot find thousands of investigative and feature stories for which the SF Weekly won many journalism awards, including a Polk Award for environmental reporting on the radioactive Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, now, nonetheless, repurposed as prime residential real estate. Forty years of recorded San Francisco history is gone, including the first deep profile of Kamala Harris, Kamala’s Karma, written by me in 2003 when she ran successfully for district attorney. Prior to Reilly’s purchase of the SF Weekly, the national media frequently linked to that story as unveiling Harris’s “political DNA”—but now it is a 404. You can read it here, however, where I saved a copy for history.

A sprinkle of SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith’s investigative stories survive in the archive, but not the vast majority of the historically invaluable hundreds of columns he wrote detailing city affairs. And I could not find any of the hundreds of stories I wrote during a six-year stint as a staff writer from 1998 to 2004. Reilly did not respond to repeated inquiries about why he largely liquidated the Archive and its first drafts.

Who is Clint Reilly, Really?

During decades of operating lucrative political campaigns, Reilly, known for his fierce temper and disparagement of employees, was nicknamed, by those who knew him best, “Satan.” In 1999, Reilly retired from consulting on mayoral races and ran for San Francisco mayor himself. Reilly’s campaign mailers featured a series of SF Weekly investigative reports on the terrible condition of the municipal bus and rail systems, MUNI, reported by me.

He called me often during and after the campaign, buttering me with “off the record” stories, mostly gossip about his foes. Reilly lost massively after spending millions of his own money, $4 per vote. His campaign collapsed when he was repeatedly portrayed in the media by a former employee as having an anger management problem and beating a girlfriend. But hope springs eternal.

In winter 2001, as Reilly sought to restart his political career, I spent a week with him under the condition that everything he said was on the record. I taped all the conversations. Despite Reilly’s often expressed hatred of reporters, he somehow fancied that I was his admirer.

“Who is Clint Reilly, Really?” was widely acknowledged as destroying Reilly’s political career because his mother, Bess Reilly, told me on the record, “People do not really like him. He’s not lovable.” Ironically, when Mrs. Reilly said that in her small living room in San Leandro, my tape recorder had malfunctioned, and she was not on tape, which Reilly did not know. I subsequently asked Reilly to respond to her observation. A few minutes later, after a quick call to her, Reilly confirmed that his mother had said he was not lovable. “She knows me best,” he quipped with a strangling chuckle.

A few weeks after the profile was published, a Reilly confidant told me that the story had permanently killed “Satan’s” political career, as future opponents could always quote his mother to great effect. And Reilly has not run since.

Today, the SF Weekly archive pops up an array of flattering stories about Reilly, his Catholic philanthropies, and his spouse, Janet Reilly, who also has political aspirations. The missing profile can be found here, as I saved it when Reilly bought the SF Weekly. It is also available on microfiche at the San Francisco Public Library, as are SF Weekly back issues. The history of San Francisco’s political underside is not dead yet, as long as you know where to look.

Censoring history

The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine is a hit-or-miss tool; it only samples selected publications on random dates. It did save Kamala’s Karma, but not the Reilly story. With most newsprint journalism dead or on life-support, consigning stories to online archives controlled by politicians and financiers is a formula for destruction.

For example, in 2011, I published an impactful eight-part investigative series on the financial conflicts of interest of sitting University of California Regents, especially those of Regent Richard Blum, the husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Investor’s Club: How the University of California Regents Spin Public Money into Private Profit was crowd-financed by online-only Spot.us, one of the first journalism organizations to pivot to online crowdfunding, led by David Cohen, with support from the Knight Foundation.

Portions of my voluminous series on regental corruption were published in print and online in many different publications, mostly alt-weeklies, but the whole series was only available online at Spot.us. In 2012, Spot.us was purchased by American Public Media, which immediately nuked The Investor’s Club….

That online-only investigation of the Regents does not exist on paper or microfiche. But it remains available here—you might want to print it out, especially if you are curious about why Janet Reilly, a former public relations consultant and failed candidate for city supervisor and state assembly member, was appointed chair of the University of California Regents last July.

You won’t read about whatever deals were involved to secure Reilly’s plum Regent’s job in the SF Weekly, SF Examiner, or Nob Hill Gazette. But the key to understanding the political present is grasping history, and, when appropriate, talking to the mothers of politicians; they know them best.

PETER BYRNE is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written on a wide array of topics, from science and medicine to public finance and government corruption. His reporting portfolio can be found here.