The media in the San Francisco Bay Area has historically focused on San Francisco but also includes two other major media centers, Oakland and San Jose. The Federal Communications Commission, Nielsen Media Research, and other similar media organizations treat the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Area as one entire media market. The region hosts to one of the oldest radio stations in the United States still in existence, KCBS (AM) (740 kHz), founded by engineer Charles Herrold in 1909. As the home of Silicon Valley, the Bay Area is also a technologically advanced and innovative region, with many companies involved with Internet media or influential websites.
The first newspaper published by Americans in California was The Californian, printed in Monterey in 1846 announcing the Mexican–American War, written half in English and half Spanish. The press was moved to San Francisco and printing started up again on May 22, 1847 in competition with the weekly California Star, beginning that January. The first newspaper published solely in English in San Francisco was The Star published by Mormon pioneer Sam Brannan before San Francisco was renamed from Yerba Buena in 1847. Both efforts suspended publication in the face of the California Gold Rush. By August, The Californian had resumed publication, but by November 1848, both papers were bought and merged, then renamed the Alta California.
The press that once printed The Californian was moved to the Sacramento area to be used on the Placer Times. The press was again moved and began publishing the Motherlode's first paper, the Sonora Herald, then taken to Columbia to print the Columbia Star. Within a few years of the discovery of gold, mother lode towns all had multiple competing journals. Before 1860, California had 57 newspapers and periodicals serving an average readership of 290,000.
James King of William began publishing the Daily Evening Bulletin in San Francisco in October, 1855 and built it into the highest circulation paper in the city. He criticized a city supervisor named James P. Casey, who, on the afternoon of the story about him, ran in the paper, shot and mortally wounded King. Casey was lynched by the early vigilante committee. The Morning Call was established and began publishing in December 1856, and later merged with the Bulletin to become the long-running Call-Bulletin. The San Francisco Chronicle debuted in June, 1865 as the Dramatic Chronicle, founded by Charles and M.H. de Young aged 19 and 17.
In 1887, young William Randolph Hearst took over his father's Daily Examiner, which became the flagship of his national chain.
Fremont Older became editor of the San Francisco Bulletin in 1895 and took up the struggle against the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad and along with fellow Californian Lincoln Steffens, became a well-known muckraker and the first objective observer to accuse District Attorney Charles Fickert of the framing of labor radical Thomas Mooney.
The oldest African-American newspaper, still active in the 1930s, was the California Eagle. It appeared first in Los Angeles in 1879. The first French journals, the Californien and the Gazette Republicane both began in 1850, and were followed by the Courrier du Pacifique in 1852. Both the first German and first Italian papers, the California Demokrat (1852) and the Voce del Popolo (1859) were founded in San Francisco and had long runs. Chinese in California have published many newspapers, the first being the Gold Hills News in 1854.
Noted journalists, writers, cartoonists and publishers have passed through San Francisco's media world, including:
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By the early decades of the 20th century, San Francisco supported four major dailies and numerous influential weeklies. The dailies were the San Francisco Call (later Call-Bulletin), the San Francisco Examiner , the San Francisco Chronicle and the Scripps-Howard-owned Daily News . The weeklies included the Wasp , the Argonaut , the Labor Clarion , the Coast Seamen's Journal , Emanu-el , Liberator and the News Letter .
Today, several newspapers, covering community, regional, national, and international news, and community-specific papers, catering to niche markets and individual neighborhoods, are in circulation in the San Francisco Bay Area. The major English-language newspapers include the daily East Bay Times , San Francisco Chronicle , San Francisco Examiner , and San Jose Mercury News . The weekly alternative papers are the Metro Silicon Valley , East Bay Express , and SF Weekly . The Epoch Times , Singtao Daily , World Journal , and Kangzhongguo are among the Asian newspapers that serve the Bay Area.
Aside from the major English broadsheets, the Bay Area also publishes newspapers catering to the large ethnic communities in the region, including:
Several college newspapers also exist as well in the Bay Area, including:
The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the tenth-largest television market in the United States, with five of the six major U.S. television networks (ABC, CBS, The CW, NBC, and Fox) having owned-and-operated stations serving the region. [15] All six, plus major Spanish-language networks Telemundo, Univision, and UniMás, also own and operate stations that serve the San Francisco market. KPIX, Channel 5, was San Francisco's first television station when it signed on the air on December 22, 1948; it was also the first commercial television station in northern California.
In addition to local television channels, several television networks have regional news bureaus in the San Francisco Bay Area, including BBC, CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera America, Russia Today, CCTV America, and PBS. Regional sports networks NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California both originate from the studios of NBC-Telemundo duopoly KNTV-KSTS.
The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the fourth-largest radio market in the United States, with all of the major U.S. radio networks having affiliates serving the region. While most radio stations targeting the Bay Area originate in San Francisco, it also includes stations broadcasting from San Jose, mostly to South Bay listeners and other parts of the Bay Area depending on reception. The San Jose radio market ranks as the 37th largest, but is considered an embedded market within the Bay Area.
Radio broadcasting in the region can be traced back to the efforts of Charles Herrold and Lee de Forest as early as 1907; Herrold would ultimately establish station KQW in 1921, now known as KCBS.
Besides websites that exist in addition to print publications, many publications that only exist online have come into existence in recent years. The most notable include:
As the home of Silicon Valley, several high technology companies involved with Internet media or social media are either headquartered or have a significant presence in the Bay Area. These include the following:
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector.
Palo Alto is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
East Palo Alto is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of East Palo Alto was 30,034. It is situated on the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly halfway between the cities of San Francisco and San Jose. To the north and east is the San Francisco Bay, to the west is the city of Menlo Park, and to the south the city of Palo Alto. The city is directly north of Palo Alto. East Palo Alto was founded as an unincorporated community and incorporation in July 1983. The two cities are separated only by San Francisquito Creek and, largely, the Bayshore Freeway. The revitalization projects in 2000, and high income high-tech professionals moving into new developments, including employees from Google and Facebook, have begun to slowly eliminate the historically wide cultural and economic differences between the two cities. East Palo Alto and Palo Alto share both telephone area codes and postal ZIP codes.
Little Saigon is a name given to ethnic enclaves of expatriate Vietnamese mainly in English-speaking countries. Alternate names include Little Vietnam and Little Hanoi, depending on the enclave's political history. To avoid political undertones due to the renaming of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, it is occasionally called by the neutral name Vietnamtown. Saigon is the former name of the capital of the former South Vietnam, where a large number of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants emigrating to the United States originate from, whereas Hanoi is the current capital of Vietnam.
The Mercury News is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidiary of Media News Group which in turn is controlled by Alden Global Capital, a vulture fund. As of March 2013, it was the fifth largest daily newspaper in the United States, with a daily circulation of 611,194. As of 2018, the paper has a circulation of 324,500 daily and 415,200 on Sundays. As of 2021, this further declined. The Bay Area News Group no longer reports its circulation, but rather "readership". For 2021, they reported a "readership" of 312,700 adults daily.
Bay Area News Group (BANG) is the largest publisher of daily and weekly newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including its flagship The Mercury News. A subsidiary of the Denver-based MediaNews Group, its corporate headquarters is in San Jose, California, and publication offices in San Jose. Since 2010, MediaNews Group has been controlled by Alden Capital. Previously known as ANG, the name changed to Bay Area News Group in 2006 after the MediaNews Group bought The Mercury News and Contra Costa Times from McClatchy Co. Most production aspects have now moved to The Mercury News facilities in San Jose, California.
The East Bay Times is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Walnut Creek, California, United States, owned by the Bay Area News Group (BANG), a subsidiary of Media News Group, that serves Contra Costa and Alameda counties, in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Contra Costa Times, and took its current name in 2016 when it was merged with other sister papers in the East Bay. Its oldest merged title is the Oakland Tribune founded in 1874.
The Daily News, originally the Palo Alto Daily News, is a free newspaper owned by MediaNews Group and located in Menlo Park. Founded in 1995, it was formerly published seven days a week and at one point had a circulation of 67,000. The Daily News is distributed in red newspaper racks and in stores, coffee shops, restaurants, schools and major workplaces. As of April 7, 2009 the paper ceased to be published as The Palo Alto Daily News and was consolidated with other San Francisco Peninsula Daily News titles; it published five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. Weekday editions were delivered to selected homes. While continuing to publish daily online, The Daily News cut its print edition back to three days a week in 2013, and one day a week in 2015.
Dave Price is an American journalist who has edited, published and founded a number of free daily newspapers including the Daily News and the Daily Post in Palo Alto, California, and the Aspen Times Daily in Aspen, Colorado.
The Northern California Rugby Football Union (NCRFU) is the Geographical Union (GU) for Adult rugby union teams in Northern California, as well as northern Nevada. The NCRFU is part of USA Rugby.
The San Mateo County Times was a daily newspaper published by the Media News Group. The paper is distributed throughout San Mateo County, Monday through Saturday. Before being sold in 1996, it had been published for over 100 years as the San Mateo Times, originally published by Amphlett Publishing.
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California centered around the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun estuaries in Northern California. The Association of Bay Area Governments defines the Bay Area as including the nine counties that border the aforementioned estuaries: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Other definitions may be either smaller or larger, and may include neighboring counties that do not border the aforementioned estuaries, such as the Central Coast counties of Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey, or the Central Valley counties of San Joaquin, Merced, and Stanislaus.
Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which is part of the larger San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California. The county seat and largest city is San Jose; with about 1,000,000 residents, it is the 10th-most populous city in the United States, California's third-most populous city and the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area. The second- and third-largest cities are Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
California Newspapers Partnership is a publisher of more than two dozen daily newspapers and several weekly newspapers in the United States state of California. The partnership is managed as a subsidiary of MediaNews Group, its majority owner. The minority partner is Stephens Media, with roughly a one-quarter ownership stake.
Gordon B. Greb was an emeritus professor of San Jose State University, a "distinguished broadcast educator"' historian and an investigative journalist.
Viet Mercury was a Vietnamese-language newspaper serving the Vietnamese American community in San Jose and the surrounding Silicon Valley area in California. It was published weekly by the San Jose Mercury News from 1999 to 2005; it also published daily for a time. It was the first Vietnamese-language newspaper published by an English-language daily, as well as the first non-Hispanic ethnic newspaper published by a major American company. Along with the Spanish-language Nuevo Mundo, it was one of two non-English weekly newspapers published by the Mercury News.
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