When a newspaper goes belly up, journalists tend to talk about the loss of a government watchdog, declining civic engagement and the threat to our democracy.
So when those sober words came flowing out of Denver last week over the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News, the sentiments didn't strike me as surprising, or wrong. Just inadequate.
Maybe that's because I was in San Francisco, sitting shiva on another newspaper with a death rattle and thinking, not about public service and the 1st Amendment, but about Herb Caen, about "the Last Man on Earth" and about a man who met his destiny with a stripper, atop a trick piano.
Newspapers tell stories for a living. But as we tell our own, we sometimes get all earnest, instead of telling people what we believe on our best days: that newspapers and newspapering can be provocative, irreverent and fun.
Yes, we get government policies changed and send crooked officials packing, but why save all the best, drag-queen-bites-dog stories for our mates in the newsroom? Doesn't verve still sell?
That brings us to the San Francisco Chronicle, the imperfect vessel for this perfectly self-centered city. The 144-year-old newspaper has never been accused of being great, but it somehow seemed to fit its place.
It's a "quirky, rambunctious, untraditional paper for a quirky, rambunctious, untraditional city," says Jon Rochmis, a journalism lecturer at San Francisco State and once top editor of the website connected to the Chron.
No one has ever replaced Caen, the man whose column constituted the city's diary for nearly 60 years until his death in 1997. The one-liners he crammed between ellipses could make or break . . . restaurants . . . stage plays . . . or the mayor. And he burnished the civic myth -- telling locals that the Golden Gate Bridge toll could never rise too high, because the ride into his beloved city was worth any price.
The Chron might have been thin on foreign and national news, overloaded with wire copy and loosely edited at times, but it knew how to wallow in the city's cherished stew of high and low culture.
So I recall, from the years I lived in the Bay Area, the front-page headline that blared Placido Domingo's 11th-hour flight to the city to fill in as "Otello" on the city's night of nights, the opening of the opera.
