East Bay papers downsize

Oakland Tribune to Become a Weekly | Seven Days | East Bay Express.

Oakland Tribune among three papers to become community weeklies, Contra Costa Times and what's left of the Trib to become full region's daily as East Bay Times.

 

Always count myself as lucky that I had a chance to work in the Tower and with some of the great pros who spent time there.
But this is just a sad, sad day.

 

San Mateo Times biting the dust too. San Jose Mercury News will lose its city in the masthead end cover the Peninsula and Silicon Valley.

But, yeah, the Tribune. A city has the NBA, NFL, MLB and a weekly?

 

I mean, this has been in effect before today. All the East Bay content has been consolidated, as has the South Bay-Peninsula stuff, for some time now.

 

Yes, but all under separate mastheads.

 

I guess I wonder why the switch to a generic title. Seems they could do one press run for the CoCo Times and another for the Trib.
I feel bad for the reporters who have to explain to editors why nobody is returning calls to someone from the East Bay Times.

 

As a one-time customer (and as a high school football stringer for one season while I was in college), when I lived in San Mateo County, I remember when they gave up on the San Mateo County Times and just started running all the Mercury News copy under the SMCT name. It was disingenuous.

I know people are going to lose their jobs, and that genuinely sucks, but at least the company is being somewhat honest with its customers from that standpoint.

 

The link says that BANG currently only had one full time reporter covering Oakland, David Debolt. Is that true? If so how are they even going to make a pretense of having seperate content for the weekly?

I also wonder how much longer until the Southern California papers of this chain suffer share the same fate.

 

I'm pretty sure Jimmy Durkin does a lot of pro stuff, including Raiders.

 

So what is BANG's flagship paper, San Jose or Contra Costa?? If LANG gets OCR and Riverside, wouldn't OCR be the flagship?? That might be weird.

 

The way I interpreted the article is that various desks such as sports and business covered Oakland. But that there was only one dedicated beat reporter to cover the police, city hall, etc. in a city with a population of 413,000.