Welcome to Gazetteer San Francisco, the first in what I hope are many Gazetteer local news websites.
We believe the core reason why the media industry is failing is due to the pernicious influence of search and social media companies on the way news is distributed and monetized. The information ecosystem dominated by the biggest companies in the world does not benefit news publishers, despite them being the main contributors of original and trustworthy facts.
Crucially, we believe that the negative impact of these companies on the news industry is not only from factors outside of the media industry’s control, such as the rise of targeted advertising and artificial intelligence, but also due to the many ways they have deliberately interacted with and ultimately come to depend on platforms.
In other words, we believe media companies would be in a better position had they never engaged with tech platforms.
And that is what we propose to do. Every day. To just go along living our lives, writing and reporting, publishing impactful news stories, and gleefully ignoring the algorithmic ebbs and flows of whatever the platforms are prioritizing on any given week.
What that means in practical terms is that we will produce great local journalism, publish it on a totally paywalled website, and distribute it directly to paid subscribers – via email and text message.
We have no social media presence, and we don’t care about search engine optimization.
We believe that removing platform considerations will allow us to focus on doing better journalism that speaks for itself and gains an audience.
I’ve assembled a team of three great reporters, and we’re hiring more journalists and looking to work with freelancers.
We’ll be covering San Francisco only, not the wider Bay Area, and will be looking to expose hypocrisy, report on power, tell the untold stories of this great city, and do it all with pizzazz.
It is an explicit, non-negotiable objective that our work is totally original, and we’ll aim to publish scoops and stories that you can’t find elsewhere.
We have no political agenda, and we’ll seek comment from a wide range of views. And let me make clear that despite believing that the news industry relationship with tech platforms is broken, we’re not anti-tech. We admire the good things that technology has achieved, but we won’t be shy about pointing out its harms.
Why San Francisco? I think that it’s the ideal place to launch a paradigm-subverting idea like this, as the tech hub of the world, where so many people are open to new things. I also believe that because there are so many here who work in tech and understand it well, that it’s a ripe market for early adopters who “get it.”
We plan on starting a slow burn of growth today, not to go viral overnight.
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, we invite you to subscribe.
Now let’s get to it, shall we?
