The New York Times-20080125-Chronicle-s Editor to Take Broader Role At Hearst
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Chronicle's Editor to Take Broader Role At Hearst
After almost eight years as the top editor, Phil Bronstein will leave The San Francisco Chronicle and take a post with its parent, the Hearst Corporation, the company announced Wednesday.
Mr. Bronstein, 57, has been editor of The Chronicle since 2000, when it was bought by Hearst, and before that he was editor of The San Francisco Examiner for nine years. He survived a turbulent period of changing ownership, declining circulation, strikes, recessions and, most recently, a sharp reduction in his newsroom staff.
Hearst officials say that The Chronicle loses more than $1 million a week.
The kinds of crisis that have gone on here nonstop in that time eventually cause you to turn around and say, 'What else do I want to be doing?' Mr. Bronstein said Thursday in an interview.
He will become editor at large for Hearst's newspaper division, working on projects like investigations and the expansion of Web sites.
When it bought The Chronicle for $660 million in 2000, Hearst owned The Examiner and moved most of that paper's news staff to The Chronicle. It simultaneously turned The Examiner over to new owners, supplying them with $66 million in subsidies.
Then recession struck, and readers and advertisers shifted to the Internet. The Chronicle, like most newspapers, has struggled ever since: its weekday circulation fell to 365,000 last year from 513,000 in 2003, a decline of nearly 30 percent.
A highlight of recent years was the paper's groundbreaking investigation into the illegal steroid business, but it also cut back sharply on coverage of national and foreign news. Last year it eliminated a quarter of its newsroom jobs, to fewer than 300 from almost 400, and many high-ranking editors were among those who left or were forced out.
Mr. Bronstein did a pretty good job of merging the two staffs, trying to keep up morale, said Carl T. Hall, an organizer for the Northern California Media Workers Guild who is on leave from his job as a Chronicle reporter. He tried to resist the worst of the budget-cutting, but eventually there was nothing he could do.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Phil Bronstein, the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE KEPKA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)