One year ago today, we launched Gazetteer SF and published our first stories.
Since then, things have changed a lot in San Francisco and the world.
We’ve got a new Mayor of San Francisco and a new (old) President of the United States.
Misinformation is ascendant and the online information ecosystem is more fractured and bifurcated than ever. It’s becoming genuinely difficult to find quality information with Google searches, while AI platforms serve up all the answers in a handy chat format – they’re just frequently wrong.
Discourse is in the toilet and it seems there is less and less of a place in today’s world for deliberate, nuanced, factual writing and thinking.
That’s what we want to change.
We started Gazetteer as a reaction to this broken information ecosystem and the challenging environment for news publishers. I began with a list of all the problems the news industry was facing, which I distilled down to one big one: the dominance of the biggest tech companies on the flow and monetization of information.
The idea was: let’s do everything differently, strip away all the noise (and expense) that interacting with these platforms entails, and publish well-written and reported local news on a clean and simple website. Send stories directly to paid subscribers by emails and text messages, have no social media or search engine presence. Budget a bit for outdoor and event marketing, but above all believe that the work will speak for itself and build an audience through true word of mouth.
Over the past 12 months:
- We’ve hired a phenomenal team of five and published 266 totally original stories about San Francisco – from investigations into the crisis-ridden SF public school system to gonzo first-person narratives of Market Street squalor (and fun), from chronicling local internet culture to scoops on the great DEI rollback.
- We’ve been covered by the the New York Times, Nieman Lab, the San Francisco Business Times, Mission Local, amongst others, and had our stories picked up by Bloomberg, CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate, and the Verge, and more.
- We’ve launched the successful Chat Room series, gathering hundreds of attendees to witness dozens of speakers and performers chop it up on big local topics in two events. (Our third Chat Room on Food is June 12.)
- We’ve reached an average audience of 10,000 unique users per month. Small by many standards but online metrics are so gamed and inflated these days that...what do they even mean? Those 10,000 people a month proactively seek out Gazetteer SF out and read our news with intention – no passive algorithmic consumption here. So I believe our audience per capita is much more valuable than a traffic-chasing site with an audience of millions.
But there’s certainly more work to do. And we want to reach more people.
As the great Bay Area poet Robert Hass wrote, “each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea.” Or put another way, you learn a lot more by doing then imagining.
So based on the doing and learning of our first year, we’re iterating and making some changes that I’m going to announce. Right now, in this post.
- PHOTOS: I’m excited to share that we’re partnering with Catchlight, a phenomenal visual-first media organization, to enhance the imagery on Gazetteer SF. We’re putting resources into original photography and you’ll see a lot more great photos to accompany our stories, taken by local freelancers and our staff.
- HOMEPAGE: We’ve revamped our homepage. What better place to show off those photos, re-surface timeless features, and allow readers to browse by subject and discover the quality San Francisco news we’re publishing.
- SEARCH: We’ve opened up Gazetteer SF to search engines. Some might not know this, but upon launch we actively prevented search engines from indexing our stories, meaning we did not show up in search results. This was perhaps the most extreme and contrarian strategy – and probably more performative and in protest than practical. While I still love the idea of existing outside the search-driven information ecosystem, we heard regularly from readers that they could not find us (obviously), and sources sometimes were less likely to speak to us when they understood we weren’t on Google. Ultimately, we’ve decided that we want our stories – and the information they contain about people, companies, and institutions – to be part of the public record.
- BLUESKY: We’re launching an account on Bluesky and will begin sharing our stories there. Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok are brainrot machines, but we’ve decided that Bluesky is different. As a Bluesky user, you own your data and have greater control over the algorithms that serve you content. Also, the platform is extremely publisher friendly and aims to surface and be a quality partner to high-quality news sources. So far, the discourse there seems to be of a higher caliber. So smash that follow button right here @sf.gazetteer.co.
We remain committed to our mission of telling true San Francisco stories that matter, and we’re excited about how these changes will improve the experience of our audience with Gazetteer SF.
I’d like to sign off by sharing two lists – a little insight into our most popular stories of the past year, as well as some hot ones that you might have missed.
Thanks for reading.
Top 10 most-read Gazetteer SF stories from April 2024 to March 2025
1. The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco
2. A former tech CEO is on a crusade to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet
3. Loyalty tests have transformed from TikTok novelty to girlboss gig work
5. San Francisco tech company Okta accused of rampant gender discrimination
6. Baggu used AI for its viral pony purse. The internet is mad.
7. Hoodline using AI to generate news stories and journalist profiles
9. Great Highway closure protests attract a Who’s Who of anti-woke culture warriors
10. In between gods, looking for work
10 lesser-read Gazetteer SF stories I think you should read, in no particular order
The night Sylvester changed San Francisco
Reflections on the night Castro disco legend Sylvester burned down the War Memorial Opera House
We retraced the steps of the viral ‘sketchiest walk’ through Mid Market, talked to folks on the street, and made a new friend
The headline says it all
Stop feeding coyotes. You’re getting them killed – and putting humans at risk
Experts blame whichever idiots keep giving them rotisserie chickens
SFPD quietly deployed drones at Outside Lands, Pride, and the Dolores Hill Bomb
Police drone usage skyrockets
‘Fear and uncertainty’ pervades S.F. US Attorney’s Office as Trump pick looms
Palace intrigue and worries of threats to an apolitical tradition
An ode to Tommy’s Joynt, the city’s paragon of gloriously okay food
Let’s hope San Francisco’s oldest hofbrau never changes
Scary Dairy
Despite looming bird flu and newfound embrace by the alt-right herd, raw milk is still white liquid gold in San Francisco
San Francisco’s Internet Archive fighting erasure of DEI, Jan. 6 materials
Archivists with the organization’s Wayback Machine doing God’s work to preserve history
A former nanny for an ultra-rich San Francisco family spills on her time in the trenches
Pee-pee left on the floor, a toddler drinking fish oil from the bottle, and a four-year-old raised by iPads and staff
SF’s best-kept dining secret is at a SoMa strip club
Chicken and prime rib and strippers, oh my!
