In the Heart of Tech, a Persistent Digital Divide
100,000 city residents cannot afford the Internet at homeIn recent years, San Francisco has become the epicenter of technological development. While multi-billion dollar companies develop the latest...
View ArticleIn Bid for Dominance, Mayor’s Allies Flood S.F. Politics With Corporate Cash
Tech, real estate donations made 2015 election the most expensive on record, posing challenge for campaign finance reforms this fall.Last year spending on local elections was the highest on record,...
View ArticleElection Ads Overshadowed TV News 7-to-1
For the 10 weeks between Aug. 25 and Election Day in 2015, San Francisco’s five English-language commercial television stations serving the San Francisco Bay Area (KRON, KTVU, KNTV, KPIX and KGO) aired...
View ArticleSlick, Misleading TV Ads Paid Off
Airbnb’s multimillion-dollar blitz was key to killing measure aimed at short-term rentals.Fear, disinformation, deception. That’s what San Francisco voters were bombarded with last fall through...
View ArticleOnline TV Archive Preserves History of Politics Coverage
Audio fingerprinting’ makes it possible to track political ads.For this look-back at the November 2015 election, the Public Press spent many hours tracking down televised political ads and related news...
View ArticleMining the Internet Archive’s TV News
The San Francisco Public Press recently sat down with Roger Macdonald, the director of television projects at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Internet Archive.Macdonald demonstrated how people can...
View ArticleGuerrilla Art Project Uses News for ‘Housing Displacement Facts’
For graphic designer Erik Schmitt, the fall 2017 issue of the Public Press was news he could use.As a fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, he was undertaking the monumental task of "finding...
View ArticleAn Ethnic Media Beacon Goes Dark, but Its Creator Keeps Inspiring
When Sandy Close recruited a young African-American rapper to her news organization, Pacific News Service, his first assignment was to write about Cantopop, popular music that swept Hong Kong and...
View ArticleA Critique of S.F. Media Coverage of Homelessness
Sylvie Sturm is a journalist and a recent graduate of San Francisco State University. For a research project, she compiled and analyzed hundreds of articles and columns published in the San Francisco...
View ArticleIn ‘Uncuffed,’ Incarcerated Men Record and Tell Their Own Audio Stories
On this edition of “Civic,” two producers for the audio series “Uncuffed” share how they became journalists. Greg Eskridge, at San Quentin State Prison, and Steve Drown, at California State Prison,...
View ArticleAs Newspapers Decline, Some Pursue Nonprofit Model
Since 2004, more than 1,800 newspapers have closed around the country, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for writers and literary freedom. That’s an estimated loss...
View ArticleNew Magazine Offers Tribute to San Francisco Subcultures
Some San Francisco bookstores carry a colorful magazine that looks like the New Yorker of the west coast. This is the San Franciscan, a new print magazine with a mission to “celebrate the diverse...
View ArticleSustaining Local Media During the Public Health Crisis
Even as more people than ever are turning to local media for reliable information during the COVID-19 crisis, many local outlets are actually laying off staff because of a collapse in the advertising...
View ArticleHow ‘Civic’ Is Produced and Broadcast From Home
Under shelter-in-place orders, the Public Press staff has been producing the local current affairs program “Civic” from home, conducting interviews remotely and managing a radio station at a distance....
View ArticleMedia Focus on Trump Misinformation Distracts From Serious Pandemic Coverage...
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many of us to turn to news outlets to learn more about the virus, shelter-in-place orders, data on infections and deaths, and other details from political leaders,...
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