San Francisco Independent

The San Francisco Independent was the largest non-daily newspaper in the United States.^[4] It helped to popularize the free newspaper (advertising supported) as a business model at the beginning of the 21st century,^[5] and also rescued one of the city's two major daily newspaper, the afternoon / evening San Francisco Examiner (founded 1863, and purchased 1880 by U.S. Senator George Hearst, then passed on in 1887 to son and later longtime famous national newspaper syndicate titan William Randolph Hearst, senior, 1863–1951, and flagship since 1880 of his subsequent national newspaper publishing syndicate). The efforts of the Fang Family through its purchase to keep it from being shut down a century and a half later by the descendent Hearst Communications media empire, after they bought the longtime morning competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle with its De Young family ownership in 2000 from the remaining family ownership members.^[6]

The Independent publication was founded in 1958 as a neighborhood newspaper originally called the Lake Merced Independent.^[1] Marsha Fontes, a local historian, took the reins two decades later in 1979, covering its suburban residential area, institutions surrounding the public water reservoir of Lake Merced, in the southwest part of San Francisco, California. She sold it after almost a decade of work to Ted Fang and the Asian American descendents Fang family in 1987.^[7] As the new editor and publisher, Fang almost immediately began ambitiously growing The Independent, expanding its printed appearance from a tabloid format into a standard broadsheet sized page preferred by more major newspapers and extending its circulation / distribution zone citywide in the following year of 1988.^[8] Six years later in 1993, Fang purchased a chain of weeklies in suburban San Mateo County owned by the Chicago Tribune and its longtime owner, national media syndicate, the Tribune Company.^[9] By 1998 all of the San Francisco Bay area with the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metropolitan area publications were reorganized and re-branded to be known simply as The Independent (without a geographic or city designation presaging its future multi-city regional expansion and vision).^[10] A decade later at the beginnings of the 21st century, in 2000, the Fang family then moved into national political media attention by purchasing the longtime Hearst Communications (media syndicate) flagship, the "San Francisco Examiner', one of the Bay Area region's two major daily papers (The Examiner originally owned by late-19th and early-20th centuries newspaper syndicate legendary mogul / titan William Randolph Hearst, 1863–1951) and so the Fangs became the first Asian American family to run a major daily newspaper in America.^[11]

The Independent covered neighborhood stories and issues that affected the development of the San Francisco Bay area during this period,^[12] and each issue of the bi-weekly had twelve different editorial editions tailored to the city and suburbs on the peninsula to the south of different neighborhoods.^[13] Among the issues championed by The Independent included saving Laguna Honda Hospital and re-building it into one of the largest skilled nursing facilities in the country.^[14] The Independent''s campaigning editorial positions also helped set the direction for San Francisco's future into the 21st century, helping to elect the first police chief to serve as Mayor of San Francisco, the first African American to serve as Mayor of the city, and one of the most progressive / liberal positioned city prosecutors / district attorneys in America for the City of San Francisco.^[3]

The Independent was a key player in the last chapter of the San Francisco's newspaper wars in the controversies in the competition ongoing between the longtime two remaining major daily papers Examiner and Chronicle' left-over from the original half-dozen daily publications that once competed for readers and attention, circulated and served during the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when reading was the main form of mass communication media, (before the competition of additional outlets of radio and television stations news departments starting in the late 1940s). During those 1990s, "papers war" , the San Francisco Bay area was one of the then few remaining American cities / metro areas with still competing papers of different owners.^[15] The Independent twice sued both of the city's daily newspapers, the Examiner and Chronicle, over monopolistic business practices by both of the major dailies.^[16] And all three newspapers frequently covered the activities of their competitors, with articles about each other in sometimes disparaging terms. The media campaign in the Bay area even was described by the national journalism / publishing industry's trade publication Editor & Publisher magazine.^[17]

As of 2000, The Independent was distributed three times in the week,. but by March 2001, The Independent had ceased delivering to homes on Saturdays, being distributed only at newsstands and as an insert into the newly acquired San Francisco Examiner according to its also widespread in the last three decades, with the new computer media with its internet website and online news source "SFGate".^[18] The newspaper has since stopped publication as. it reorganized and redeveloped the Examiner as a free advertising -supported only, daily newspaper, plus its temporary expansion into several other American cities with newly established Examiner competing printed papers there, such as the brief Baltimore Examiner in 2006–2010, and still continuing of the formerly printed but now online publication (in 2024) of the nearby Washington Examiner, which has adopted a more right-wing Conservative political editorial positions on national and international issues and offering a competing views in a national voice (compared to its competition there in the national / federal capital of the longtime media leader The Washington Post).