Why The San Francisco Bay Guardian Failed

The paper's politics were often glossed as progressive, but critics reckoned that was a misnomer. Progress in the sense of modernization or urbanization had little place on its agenda. It could actually be rather reactionary in its defense of what it saw as San Francisco's historic character. In a city that leaned left to begin with, even former employees admit the Guardian's editorials often amounted to "preaching to the choir."

That predictability left it vulnerable to competition from upstart rivals, most notably the SF Weekly, which at times leaned libertarian but was generally more catholic in its outlook. (Former Slate media columnist Jack Shafer was the Weekly's editor for a brief period in the mid-1990s. Now at Reuters, Shafer wrote an astute piece last year about the forces behind alt-weeklies' long decline.)

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