Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

San Francisco Chronicle

U.S. center-left

Owned byHearst Communications — a privately held media conglomerate headquartered in New York
FundingDigital and print subscriptions, digital and print advertising, and native-advertising content produced through its in-house StoryStudio division; digital advertising has grown to roughly half of total revenue
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The paper was founded on January 16, 1865, as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young, starting as a theater listings sheet distributed in San Francisco hotels before quickly expanding into a full-service newspaper. It became the highest-circulation paper on the West Coast by 1880, and the de Young family controlled it through the Chronicle Publishing Company for more than 130 years. Hearst Communications purchased the paper on July 27, 2000, ending family ownership and integrating it into the Hearst newspaper group. A flamboyant period under executive editor Scott Newhall from the 1950s into the early 1970s emphasized sensational headlines; the paper took progressive editorial turns thereafter, most notably by hiring Randy Shilts, whose reporting on the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s became nationally influential. The Chronicle struggled financially in the mid-2000s as print advertising collapsed industry-wide, losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but a turnaround built on digital advertising, a subscription paywall, and new content-marketing revenue streams returned it to profitability by 2013. Rated Left by AllSides and Left-Center by Media Bias/Fact Check, its editorial board makes candidate endorsements and takes positions aligned with its liberal Bay Area readership. The paper has won seven Pulitzer Prizes and, as of recent reporting, carries roughly 137,000 digital subscribers alongside about 35,000 average print copies in circulation.

Sources

  1. San Francisco Chronicle — Wikipedia
  2. Hearst Completes Purchase of SF Chronicle — Hearst.com
  3. San Francisco Chronicle Bias and Credibility — Media Bias/Fact Check
  4. San Francisco Chronicle Media Bias — AllSides
  5. SF Chronicle, once imperiled, is profitable — Poynter
  6. Hearst StoryStudio and SF Chronicle Revenue — Hearst.com
  7. SF Chronicle history: Through the looking glass — sfchronicle.com
  8. Chronicle Publishing Company — Wikipedia

Profile compiled 2026-08-25; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record