page_title: San Francisco
section_title: Media
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco / Culture and contemporary life / Media
caption_attribution_description: English: San Francisco Chronicle newspaper building at 901 Mission and 5th Streets in San Francisco. 1999 photograph by Nancy Wong
context_page_description: San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco and colloquially known as The City, SF, or Frisco and San Fran, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 16th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California, with 881,549 residents as of 2019. It covers an area of about 46.89 square miles, mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is the 12th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States by population, with 4.7 million people, and the fourth-largest by economic output, with GDP of $549 billion in 2018. With San Jose, it forms the fifth most populous combined statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area.
  As of 2020, San Francisco has the highest salaries, disposable income, and median home prices in the world at $1.7 million, as well as the highest median rents.
context_section_description: The major daily newspaper in San Francisco is the San Francisco Chronicle, which is currently Northern California's most widely circulated newspaper. The Chronicle is most famous for a former columnist, the late Herb Caen, whose daily musings attracted critical acclaim and represented the "voice of San Francisco". The San Francisco Examiner, once the cornerstone of William Randolph Hearst's media empire and the home of Ambrose Bierce, declined in circulation over the years and now takes the form of a free daily tabloid, under new ownership. Sing Tao Daily claims to be the largest of several Chinese language dailies that serve the Bay Area. SF Weekly is the city's alternative weekly newspaper. San Francisco and 7x7 are major glossy magazines about San Francisco. The national newsmagazine Mother Jones is also based in San Francisco.
  The San Francisco Bay Area is the sixth-largest television market and the fourth-largest radio market in the U.S. The city's oldest radio station, KCBS, began as an experimental station in San Jose in 1909, before the beginning of commercial broadcasting. KALW was the city's first FM radio station when it signed on the air in 1941. The city's first television station was KPIX, which began broadcasting in 1948.
  All major U.S. television networks have affiliates serving the region, with most of them based in the city. CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Al Jazeera America, Russia Today, and CCTV America also have regional news bureaus in San Francisco. Bloomberg West was launched in 2011 from a studio on the Embarcadero and CNBC broadcasts from One Market Plaza since 2015. ESPN uses the local ABC studio for their broadcasting. The regional sports network, Comcast SportsNet Bay Area and its sister station Comcast SportsNet California, are both located in San Francisco. The Pac-12 Network is also based in San Francisco.
  Public broadcasting outlets include both a television station and a radio station, both broadcasting under the call letters KQED from a facility near the Potrero Hill neighborhood. KQED-FM is the most-listened-to National Public Radio affiliate in the country. Another local broadcaster, KPOO, is an independent, African-American owned and operated noncommercial radio station established in 1971. CNET, founded 1994, and Salon.com, 1995, are based in San Francisco.
  San Francisco-based inventors made important contributions to modern media. During the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge began recording motion photographically and invented a zoopraxiscope with which to view his recordings. These were the first motion pictures. Then in 1927, Philo Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image. This was the first television.
caption: San Francisco Chronicle Building
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