Via Hot Air, conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders has a piece up today on how conservatives shouldn’t “dance a jig” at the demise of her paper:

As for those who only read their news online, here’s a news flash: News stories do not sprout up like Jack’s beanstalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.
Reduced ad revenue and falling newspaper circulation mean that there will be fewer people to cover the same number of stories. In the middle of an economic crisis and President Obama’s federal spending bonanza, there will be fewer watchdogs to guard the shop.
So, to those of you who argue that the demise of liberal newspapers (The Chronicle in particular) is deserved, I offer a caveat: Be careful what you wish for.
Remember the ugly consequences of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy for juvenile offenders, who were sent abroad instead of to jail? Or Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums failure to tackle crime in Oaktown? Or reports on corporate bonuses for execs at bailed-out banks? Imagine that those things happened, but there was no journalist to investigate and report.

One, I think she’s right, and we do need newspapers. But, two, lets not kid ourselves that the newspaper business doesn’t have a history of creation and destruction of individual titles. For example, here’s the history of the Chronicle via Wikipedia (focus on the demise of “other dailies”):

Between World War II and 1971, new editor Scott Newhall took a bold and somewhat provocative approach to news presentation. Newhall’s Chronicle included investigative reporting by such staffers as Pierre Salinger, later to play a prominent role in national politics, and Paul Avery, who pursued the trail of the self-named “Zodiac Killer” whose crimes chilled late-1960s San Francisco. It also featured such colorful columnists as Pauline Phillips, who wrote under the name “Dear Abby,” “Count Marco” (Marc Spinelli), Stanton Delaplane, Terence O’Flaherty, Lucius Beebe, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, and Herb Caen. The newspaper grew in circulation to become the city’s largest, overtaking the rival San Francisco Examiner. The demise of other San Francisco dailies through the late 1950s and early 1960s left the Examiner and the Chronicle to battle for circulation and readership superiority; the competition took a financial toll on both papers until the summer of 1965, when a merger of sorts created a Joint Operating Agreement under which the Chronicle became the city’s sole morning daily while the Examiner changed to afternoon publication (which ultimately led to a declining readership). The two newspapers’ editorial staffs combined to produce a joint Sunday edition, with the Examiner publishing the news sections and the Sunday magazine and the Chronicle responsible for features. From 1965 on the two papers shared a single classified-advertising operation. This arrangement stayed in place until the Hearst Corporation took full control of the Chronicle.
The de Young family controlled the paper, via the Chronicle Publishing Company, until July 27, 2000, when it was sold to Hearst Communications, Inc., who owned the Examiner. Following the sale, the Hearst Corporation transferred the Examiner to the Fang family, publisher of the San Francisco Independent and AsianWeek, along with a $66-million subsidy.[3] Under the new owners, the Examiner became a free tabloid, leaving the Chronicle as the only daily broadsheet newspaper in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Examiner (as well as the DC Examiner, and the online Baltimore Examiner) is now owned by Phil Anschutz, founder of Walden Media — and I doubt he’s lamenting the end of the Chronicle. I’m not sure that what is happening in San Francisco — or the similar situation in Seattle with the Post-Intelligencer — is anything more than the continuation of what has always been a cut-throat business.

As for the future of the Examiner brand: According to Anschutz’s Wikipedia entry, the Examiner name as been trademarked in more than 60 cities. So, yes, there’s a future for local newspapers — and who knows, readers in San Francisco might grow to enjoy Byron York’s columns as much as NR and NRO readers have.