San Francisco Citizen

[Whoops, spoke too soon - turns out that the SFGate/San Francisco Chronicle's Katie Baker was en la casa. The conspiracy of silence broken.]

Despite all the obituaries written earlier this year, The Bay Citizen celebrated its launch yesterday at the Great American Music Hall. Some TBC editors on the scene were fretting about getting a new batch of “stately idiom” finished up for the following morning, but a good time was had by all.

They literally rolled out the red carpet in the Tenderloin last night:

Who was there? Everybody. (Everybody excepting some of the hAtERz in local media who feel any new investment should go to existing concerns, you know, the ones that employ the hAtERz themselves. The hAtERz that showed somehow even managed to generate, with noticeable effort, Mona Lisa smile/smirks for the camera.) The place was packed from the get-go, baby. Check out the Party Pix from E.B.Boyd showing who all was there.

Standing room only:

Bay Citizen CEO Lisa Frazier (pronounced fraze-yah) started things off by inviting Founder Warren Hellman to play a  song.

Lois Beckett snapped the chorus and here are the full lyrics to the sing-a-long tune Hardly Strictly News.  Note the A-A-B-B rhyming scheme. Also note:

“We met with Lisa Frazier who pronounced ‘for now it will be free’/
A multi-layered news hub is the only way to be.”

What, “for now?” Uh oh:

Click to expand. It’s quite legible at 1200 pixels.

Anyway, F. Warren appeared to be somewhat irked by the constant chatter of the assembled throng. Oh well.

Here’s the mise-en-scene from up on the catwalk:

A big thank you to all the founding investors, founding members, patrons, and corporate sponsors. Notably, Dede Wilsey’s name isn’t on this list, so perhaps she just recently kicked in her seven figure donation? (Or let’s call it a $500,000 donation with Uncle Sucker kicking another half mil., mas o menos. That’s the thing with non-profit journalism – the federal govmint lowers your taxes by about 50 cents for every dollar you donate, assuming you pay a lot of taxes in the first place. This is the Unfair Advantage that the Chronicle people complain about. Speaking of which, nothing yet about TBC from the SFC – check for yourself.)  

Everybody’s a star:

$5 tote bags just like Trader Joe’s and the KQED, plus loads of free bumper stickers:

The lives of the party: 

Anyway, had to bail early to get down to Massive Attack at the Warfield while Arcadio was playing the TBC party. The booze was flowing and the place was still packed when I left, anyway.

Bon Courage, Bay Citizen!

All the deets, after the jump

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