I launched Gazetteer San Francisco online in 2024 to fight back against our broken information ecosystem. Our core strategy is that we don’t depend on algorithms to reach our audience, while our journalistic mission is to publish true, untold stories about San Francisco with a little bit of irreverence and pizzazz.
A print newspaper — the first issue of which is being distributed in San Francisco today — is the natural evolution of this strategy. As far as I know, there are no programmatic ads, tracking pixels, or recommendation engines embedded in the paper. Print is the ultimate example of owning your distribution and monetization as a publication. (Speaking of which, we’re now open for advertising business. Should you wish to buy an ad, please get in touch.)
The industry gospel in the past decade has been that print is dying, but we’re seeing green shoots of interest in the medium from people all around the Bay Area, as Cydney Hayes reports in a wonderful exclusive in the current issue. We believe that’s because no screen can ever compare to the feel and pace of reading on physical paper. That’s something we all need more of in 2026.
The written word has become devalued. First by the content mills and internet click farms of the 2010s, then by large language models that can pump out plausible but factually incorrect writing at scale. Gazetteer strives to be the opposite of all that, and I believe that there’s no better place than the printed page to restore value to the written word.
That said, we’re not against technological advancement; we’re against the harms caused by thoughtless and greedy implementation of technology. We are not necessarily anti-AI; we are anti-AI slop.
The main reason we read, I believe, is to connect with humans. And the main reason we read local news is to understand from other humans what’s happening in our vicinity.
So that’s what you can expect from Gazetteer in print: Original San Francisco news stories, written by humans and meant to be read by humans. We’ll distribute 10,000 copies of our newspaper on a quarterly basis in the finest coffee shops and gathering spaces across the city, and mail it directly to paid subscribers. (You should subscribe.) Each paper will feature exclusive stories published in print first before running online.
San Francisco is an incredible newspaper town. A century and a half of booms and busts have provided fodder for nosy scribblers and ambitious publishers doing their best to tell the story of this place. The city has attracted prospectors, beatniks, hippies, gangsters, scammers, and visionaries. It’s an immigrant city. And an inclusive city. And a city that encourages entrepreneurship and thinking differently. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that this city has a dark side.
It all makes for a fertile news environment, and it’s one we are excited to cover in print as we have online for the last year and a half.
I hope that by reading our paper you’ll feel more connected to the people and happenings of this great city.
