The Examiner Maps the Remaking of The New City

The coffee shop in the Outer Mission is not exactly a trendy restaurant on the tourist circuit, but the food is good, cheap and hearty, especially if you like a double order of mashed potatoes.

And, perhaps most important, Big Al’s is on the map for us. It’s a new and changing map, to be sure, reflecting dramatic demographic, economic, political and cultural changes.

We found Al’s because Max Kirkeberg, an urban geographer at San Francisco State University, likes to eat there. Reporter Annie Nakao found Max, and he became our New City tour guide – literally.

If the San Francisco you know was recommended in the travel guides, you probably haven’t been to The New City, where virtually all the sights are miles and a state of mind away from Fisherman’s Wharf.

From the day laborers lined up on a bleak Army Street corner to the once African American (now increasingly Asian) Leland Avenue shopping district in Visitacion Valley, we went to San Francisco.

The New City team raved about the initial tour and Assistant Metro Editor Patricia Yollin took extensive notes so she could play guide for several editors. It was such an eye opener we hired Max to lead tours for Examiner staffers.

Even with many native San Franciscans and longtime Bay Area residents at the paper, we found out that we had a lot to learn about a city we thought we knew and covered pretty well.

The tour was a way to invest the entire staff in The New City, to open eyes, minds and, yes, stomachs, to a project we wanted everyone to embrace.Among other things, we learned the tour was a way to get staffers – even editors – out of the office, into the neighborhoods, create camaraderie around the project and even enable some staffers to actually meet each other.

If you take on a project of this size (in 1998, we published 19 major stories plus sidebars for almost 56,000 words), you learn a lot of lessons:

Plan, plan and plan.
Before we published a word, we had the equivalent of grad school seminars with S.F. State professors and organizations representing a wide range of groups from community and ethnic press to a Chinese American voter education project to the Chamber of Commerce to the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

From these meetings and our own staff research, including a review of demographics, housing data and economic reports, we assembled an ambitious story list.

Make sure the first piece is great.

And be patient, even if it takes longer than you can stand.

We waited until April 26 to publish our first story. It was ambitious – an A-1 centerpiece, jumping to four inside pages. The mainbar ran 175 inches, and it was a great read. The photography and graphics were superb. We also published “First Persons,” an Examiner feature that gives people a chance to talk in their own voices.

Make sure you have newsroom support.

Before we made a proposal to the Pew Center, we brought together a group of editors and writers to brainstorm and continued that collaborative approach. Later, when we were close to publishing, Metro Editor Dick Rogers sold it to department heads at a management retreat.

Look all around the newsroom for help.

Staffers from other departments wrote stories, including our prep sports writer who did a fascinating piece on the new games being played in city playgrounds. We probably didn’t do enough of this, but we knocked down some walls and still have a healthy story list.

Look outside for help, even if it comes from a friend.

A terrific First Person about how a Chinese American daughter helped her mother get through a summons for jury duty came in because the writer, a tennis partner, asked me to read it.

If you’re doing a survey (we did a poll of 700 residents in English, Spanish and Chinese), find pollsters who are as excited about the work as you are and who can help translate data.

We hired the Public Research Institute at S.F. State and knew we had made the right choice when the director, Rufus Browning, told us: “This is the project I’ve waited all of my career to do.”

Commit resources and think big.

We came up with the staff and the news hole. We began the project with support from the Pew Center for a survey and then added a substantial amount.

Be Accepting.

Accept that you don’t know your community as well as you want to. Accept that the reason you do a project like this is to learn and learn and learn.

Once you know you don’t know everything, it’s easier to start telling true stories of neighborhoods.

Yollin, who edited “The New City,” said she learned that there’s a huge chunk of San Francisco that “most of us – who are supposed to cover the city – know nothing about. I’d lived in the Bay Area for 25 years when the project started – 15 of them in San Francisco – and there were neighborhoods I’d never been to in the southeast part of town.”

Get out of the office.

Once you get into the neighborhoods, you can report more accurately and honestly about what goes on there.

We’d run many stories about Geneva Towers, a hulking highrise project that was a haven for crime. But until we spent time in the neighborhood and interviewed former residents who thought of the Towers as a home, our coverage was one-dimensional. So when the Twin Towers were imploded, we not only covered the end of an era but found people who actually yearned for their life in the project.

Break Stereotypes.

One of our challenges or goals was to break stereotypes.

What better place than the Bayview, a largely African American community in the shadow of Candlestick Park. Or as Yollin put it:

“Silverview Terrace in the Bayview – the epitome of upscale suburban sterility – was another shock, perched on top of what’s generally considered one of the most crime-ridden parts of town. So much of Bayview seemed inviting, especially Quesada Street, a miniature of palm-lined Dolores Street, but invariably it is crime in places like the Hunters Point and Double Rock projects, and along Third Street, that we associate with Bayview. The project made me realize, in a very visceral way, how unfortunate that is.”

Let the reporters report.

Our reporters learned in many ways:

From statistics that 49 percent of San Francisco public school students are Asians.

From going into communities and finding people like 76-year-old Ralph Barsi, who has lived in his neighborhood 53 years. He charts the comings and goings of his neighbors on index cards. His fellow Italians have mostly gone. And Asians have mostly come. How does he deal with this? He still refers to them as “Chinamen,” though jokingly. But he invites them into his garage to drink homemade raisin brandy, and he has learned a few words of Chinese.

Write for the reader.

We worked hard to get out to neighborhoods, to find real people for stories. As a result, we pretty much ignored official San Francisco. We didn’t use any anonymous sources and few official sources.

Have some fun.

Not every story has to be the definitive economic or social analysis. One of my favorites was on the growing Hawaiian community, with an emphasis on food.

Feed the staff.

In addition to the stops at Al’s Good Food Cafe, we had brown bag lunches and a few celebratory wine tastings to note the good and hard work of a lot of people who didn’t mind drinking out of plastic cups.

Be flexible.

If you start out with a commitment to a yearlong project and, at the end of the year, you know the story is not going to end with the calendar, keep the project going. We can’t stop writing about “The New City” because San Francisco is a work in progress.