potrero view

February 2009

Publisher’s View: Paper Money

By Steven J. Moss

What does the View have in common with the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and San Francisco Chronicle?  It doesn’t make any money, and, unless things improve, could go out-of-business.  

For almost four decades the View has been published on the backs of volunteer writers and editors, who in past years have been paid for their troubles in the form of Goat Hill pizza.  Ruth Passen, now recovering from emergency hip surgery, focused her 1,000-watt energy making sure that important neighborhood news was covered, with lay-out and administrative support from dedicated colleagues, including Abigail Johnston and Lester Zeidman.  The paper’s operations were housed for free at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.  Still, even with all of this unpaid help, delivery, printing and other expenses consumed upwards of $50,000 a year, a cost covered by the paper’s advertisers.

Today the View operates from shared desks located at a Dogpatch-based nonprofit, with state-of-the-art computers and associated design software, a professional website, and its own bevy of newspaper boxes.  Most of the paper’s reporters and photographers, as well as its editors, work for little or no compensation.  Still, expenses, mostly associated with lay-out, are roughly one-third higher than a few years ago.  

The View isn’t so much threatened by higher costs, though, as lower advertising revenues. Ad dollars are down for multiple reasons, including the deep recession – which has already put several neighborhood shops out-of-business – and the steady demise of a number of dedicated advertisers, such as Klein’s Deli, Mani-Pedi, and Michael Gary & Co.  The View has also experienced high default rates:  over the past year roughly one out of every 10 dollars of advertising revenue owed has remained unpaid.

If the paper is unable to meet its costs – principally printing and production – it will cease publication.  This isn’t an immediate danger; advertising revenues, while down, remain sufficiently robust to pay basic expenses.  However, the economy is fragile, and businesses, even community stalwarts like The Good Life Grocery, Farley’s Café and Goat Hill Pizza have to find ways to cut costs.

The View is doing what it can to attract advertisers, mostly by publishing a paper that community members want to read.  Rate discounts are being offered to new and returning advertisers.  Classified ads can be immediately placed on the paper’s website.  Starting with this issue, web posting of each new edition will be delayed until the end of the month, so that readers are encouraged to rely on the print edition, with its easy-to-read display ads.   Later this year advertisers will be given the option of posting versions of their ads on the website.

The View could also use your help.  If each of the paper’s more than 15,000 readers invested just $5 in the View, sufficient revenue would be secured for a year.  Twice that much from each reader would insure that ill-paid writers would receive a little extra to enable them to spend a bit more time on their articles, improving the paper’s quality.

Ten dollars a year – less than 85 cents a month – isn’t much in exchange for a newspaper that does its best to cover the community’s difficult land use issues, neighborhood schools, cultural activities, and children’s lifecycle events.  Please consider having coffee at home a day or two a month instead of at Starbucks – if you buy your cup at Farley’s cut something else out – and send the View a check.  With your support we’ll get through these hard times, and the View will continue to serve as San Francisco’s longest-running neighborhood newspaper.

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