On Publishing A Newspaper for TheTenderloin District

Thanks in large part to the dot-com invasion, places for people to live and for new companies to operate in San Francisco are increasingly difficult, some say nearly impossible, to find. As a result, neighborhoods once deemed less than desirable to live in have been experiencing boom times.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the city’s Tenderloin district. Now that the Mission district has undergone gentrification, young college grads and other upwardly mobile types have turned their eyes toward midtown.

Community newspapers serve just about every other neighborhood in the city of St. Francis, so a neighborhood newspaper to unite the new, fast-growing population of San Francisco’s inner city is a must.

However, many obstacles stand in the way of a newspaper succeeding in such a market. I should know, because I tried to start one a few years ago.

I lived on Taylor between Post and Sutter for all of 1995 and developed an affinity for the neighborhood.

Living there, I had often thought that the central part of town needed it’s own newspaper. So in 1998 I decided to give it a try. By talking to shop owners and residents I found I was not only developing a publication for the Tenderloin, but for the "Tender-Nob" (Post, Sutter, Bush) and "Tenderloin Heights" (Geary and O’Farrell) as well.

Of course some merchants and residents argued with others over whether it was the "Tender-Nob" or "Lower Nob Hill", but no one on Geary and O’Farrell seemed to mind the "Tenderloin Heights" label. Oh well.

I kicked around some ideas for a name. The Tenderloin Gazette? Na. The Tenderloin Times? Already done. How about The Tenderloin Tribune? Since I was planning on serving Lower Nob Hill, some shop owners weren’t too enthralled by that. I finally decided on the San Francisco Herald.

I planned on starting the Herald as a photocopied newsletter with a small circulation at first.

With each issue it would get larger and larger, eventually evolving into a newspaper.

Despite the fact I had been successfully selling print advertising since 1991, and the ad rates were extremely inexpensive, I found a complete lack of interest in advertising support for such a venture. So much so that the first issue of the San Francisco Herald debuted as a 16 page newspaper consisting solely of my cartoons, distributed to coffee houses, bars, and book stores in the city’s "New" Mission, Haight, and Lower Nob Hill/Tenderloin districts (with the least amount of advertising coming from merchants in the latter area).

The first issue of the Herald, in July of ‘98, had a press run of 3,000 copies. Two months later, SFH #2 went up to 5,000 copies. Two months later #3 was 10,000 copies. Seeking to expand beyond being just a 16 page comic book, four months later, in March ‘99, issue 4 came out with 32 pages and a press run of 10,000 copies. Along with my comics, there were brief write-ups about music, fashion, new businesses, essays on world affairs, mentions of hip new eateries in the Tenderloin, and on a similar note, the debut of a short-lived but popular column called "Tales of the Tenderloin".

It’s now the fall of 2000, and after 13 issues the Herald is still alive. Starting next issue (Oct/Nov 2000) the Herald will continue as 32 pages, with a press run of 30,000 copies, distributed city-wide, with some copies even reaching the East Bay, Marin County, Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, and Sacramento.

Though the atmosphere of the Tenderloin is changing every day, I feel a newspaper distributed solely in the Tenderloin, solely dependent on advertising dollars from Tenderloin merchants would still be, at this juncture, very difficult to maintain as a solvent endeavor.

A better plan would be to dedicate a large chunk of a newspaper’s content toward covering the news, issues, and concerns of the Tenderloin while maintaining a citywide distribution for the flow of advertising dollars. This would prove to be even more beneficial, as news of events in the Tenderloin would entice readers in other neighborhoods to visit the central part of town.

Should you want to keep the paper solely for the neighborhood, I think, at least in this point in time, it would have to be a non-profit. Though a solvent citywide for-profit paper would help the neighborhood considerably more.