Battling For San Francisco's Suburbs

By: Lucia Moses Around this time last year, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News were touting their expanded offerings. But as much of California's Bay Area wealth evaporated, due partly to the dot-com collapse, so did some of the papers' aspirations. Both have rolled back their suburban coverage amid their cost-cutting this year.

Does this strategy, however, doom them to a no-growth future? The latest ax to fall was at the Chronicle. Last week, a year after relaunching under its new Hearst Corp. owner, the paper said it would cut about 220 full-timers, or 8.5% of its work force, citing a 20% drop in ad revenue this year. The Chronicle had already reduced other operating costs and said its Sunday magazine will go biweekly next year.

The Mercury News, meanwhile, killed its Sunday magazine in addition to cutting staff.

Some observers said the metros' suburban coverage was too shallow to make a significant
impact in the first place. But the caution the Bay Area papers are showing won't make it easier for them to grow in the surrounding communities, areas ripe for advertisers but also with distinct identities.

Critics pounced, for example, when the Knight Ridder-owned Mercury News dropped its much-ballyhooed San Francisco edition as it went to four zoned sections from seven this year. "It's not a natural geographic area," said Jim Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University.

The Merc, with daily circulation of 268,621 (260,014 under the former Audit Bureau of Circulations rules), is quick to note that it didn't cut as deeply as the Chronicle, which has killed five daily zoned sections and now packs all outlying news in a Bay Area section.

Executive Editor Phil Bronstein said the Chronicle, with daily circulation of 512,042 (494,088 under the former rules), will still cover the suburbs, but will tell stories with a broader perspective. The Chronicle's zoning strategy hadn't yielded major circulation gains anyway, he said. "We felt that it was more important to be a great regional paper," he contended.

That change in strategy suited the Merc just fine. When the Chronicle stopped publishing a section for the highly contested Peninsula region, the Merc reassigned five more reporters there, for a total of 15, and even placed ads (left) in the 30,000 free-distribution Palo Alto Daily News to promote its coverage. Something, the Merc hopes to convince readers, is better than nothing.