page_title: San Francisco Independent
section_title: Editorial Focus of The Independent
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco Independent / Editorial Focus of The Independent
caption_attribution_description: English: City Services book published by SF Independent
context_page_description: The San Francisco Independent was the largest non-daily newspaper in the United States. It helped to popularize the free newspaper as a business model at the beginning of the 21st century, and also rescued the San Francisco Examiner from being shut down by the Hearst Corporation.
  The publication was founded in 1958 as a neighborhood newspaper called the Lake Merced Independent. Marsha Fontes, a local historian, took the reins in 1979. She sold it to Ted Fang and the Fang family in 1987. As editor and publisher, Fang almost immediately began growing the Independent, expanding from a tabloid format into a standard broadsheet size newspaper and extending distribution citywide in 1988. In 1993, Fang purchased a chain of weeklies in San Mateo County owned by the Chicago Tribune and in 1998 all the publications were re-branded as The Independent. In 2000, the Fang family purchased the SF Examiner and the Fangs became the first Asian American family to run a major daily newspaper in America.
context_section_description: The Independent started as a neighborhood newspaper, carrying advertisements from neighborhood businesses and covering local news for neighborhood residents. Fang continued this “pro-neighborhood stance inspired by grass roots reporting”  even as the paper grew to cover all of San Francisco and the San Francisco peninsula. The Independent achieved this through the use of targeting editorial content in 12 different zones over its total circulation of 379,000 copies covering from San Francisco through Redwood City.
  The Independent was an avid protector of the free press and a fighter for more open government. One of the Independent’s first major actions under Fang was to file suit against the City and County of San Francisco to open up closed-door meetings being held by then Mayor Art Agnos and some of the city supervisors. Fang and The Independent were also a co-founder of the California Free Press Association to advocate for the needs of free newspaper publishers.
  Generally representing a non-establishment viewpoint, The Independent’s editorial coverage became more ambitious and strident as the newspaper grew. In the 1990s for example, The Independent began an “aggressive public awareness and voter education campaign with the goal of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new state-of-the-art facility" for Laguna Honda Hospital. With political consultant Jack Davis, Independent columnist Warren Hinckle, healthcare union leader Sal Roselli and Public Health Department Director Dr. Mitchell Katz, among others, the “Laguna Honda First” campaign resulted in a $400 million rebuild of the institution as the only publicly funded long-term care facility of its kind in the U.S.
  The Independent also became a leading voice in citywide elections. In 1991, The Independent published its first book, The Agnos Years, a collection of Warren Hinckle’s columns critical of then Mayor Art Agnos. Up to that point, the SF Examiner – and its publisher William Randolph Hearst III – had been the leading editorial voice in San Francisco politics. That year, Hearst fired Hinckle and endorsed Agnos’ re-election during the runoff. When Agnos was unseated by political newcomer and former police chief Frank Jordan, backed by The Independent, it also intensified the newspaper feud into open editorial warfare. The following year, Hearst retired as publisher to become a venture capitalist.
  The Independent backed the election of Mayor Willie Brown in 1995 and partnered with Brown’s administration on a number of neighborhood and diversity initiatives for San Francisco. The Independent also supported the crime prevention policies of then Supervisor Terence Hallinan in his successful campaign to become San Francisco District Attorney. Fang served as co-chair of District Attorney Hallinan’s transition committee.
caption: City Services book published by SF Independent
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