On Sunday afternoon, January 28, 2007, a bit after 2pm, there was a house fire on the 2000 block of McAllister Street, just off Masonic Avenue, in San Francisco, California, USA. 
The fire trucks’ sirens drew our attention to the black smoke pouring into the sky. We watched the ladder trucks arrive and extend, and the smoke choked off in under 30 minutes. This scene was visible from our house, and we walked over later in the afternoon to see the aftermath. Wasn’t much to see from the outside, beyond lots of ashy debris piled on the street in front of the house. The exterior was not breached, at least as far as we could see. It didn’t appear, from general attitudes of those lingering and watching, that anyone had been hurt. But I wondered.
In this morning’s printed San Francisco Chronicle, there was nothing at all. Not a word.
On the website, there were two or three paragraphs, noting that the two-alarm fire was brought under control in 20 minutes or so, and no one had been hurt. Nothing more. I noticed, sort of, the byline Bay City News.
When I went back this evening, to see if there was more, the information was gone. Why? Because the Chronicle doesn’t cover its own named city with anything approaching comprehensiveness. Instead, the Chronicle purchases some of its local news from a business called Bay City News, and if you look carefully here, you will (for a few weeks, I think), be able to see the headline in question: Buy – Jan 28, 2007 – BCN58 – UPDATE: TWO-ALARM SF FIRE UNDER CONTROL (108 words).
I’m not interested enough to pay $20 for the 108 words (~$0.05/word) I read earlier this morning for free, but I did click the “Buy” link to find out that price, and was accosted by this pop-up window.
By clicking OK you agree that you are not an employee or representative of a media organization and you agree not to reuse, republish or retransmit the information you receive without the express written consent of Bay City News Service.
I guess this counts as DRM on a budget: assert your copyright. I know nothing about Bay City News beyond what’s written there: 20 reporters, around since 1979. I wonder if any local news organization (print, online, radio, TV) is not dependent on this wire service.
So much for local news
In an era when the Boston Globe (among many others) is closing foreign bureaus for cost-cutting reasons, I would expect a death grip on the last “exclusive” a local newspaper has…local news. Instead, that grip has slipped. Or maybe it slipped long ago and I just noticed!
I’m well aware there are more important stories to cover. I just found a local fire something of immense interest to a group of people loosely coupled by geography, and little answer to this information need. Maybe there never was a time when the Chronicle and other big city papers covered this kind of event closely (or at all). But the myth, at least, of local news was that crime, fire, school boards, and the like were the foundation of a newspaper. If these “beats” have disappeared, then where is the heart of the newspaper?
More information about the fire
I don’t know the exact address, but the fire was right here, in the building to the right of the green arrow. You can see the five photos I took, although I apologize for their distance. I didn’t bring the camera when we walked over later.
All I could find on the web was this brief mention on a firefighter blog, which points to the local ABC TV affiliate website story, written by Bay City News (of course). At least I saved $20.