San Francisco Bay Guardian closing after 48-year run

The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the left-leaning alternative weekly in the Bay Area, said Tuesday it stopped publishing immediately after its parent company pulled funding for its operations.

In a message to readers on its website, the 48-year old paper said the final issue will be distributed Wednesday.

"As a company, we are proud of the SF Bay Guardian's legacy as a community watchdog, a publication with stellar reporting and its passion to push for a better city," it said. "We say good-bye to a member of our media family and to an institution that has been a vital advocate for its vision for San Francisco for nearly half a century."

In a staff e-mail obtained by local blog SFist.com, Glenn G. Zuehls, publisher of the paper's parent company, the San Francisco Media Co., told employees that "the amount of money that the Bay Guardian loses each week is causing damage to the heart of the company and cannot justify its continued publication."

The newspaper "is not a viable business and has not been for many years," Zuehls said.

The San Francisco Media Co. took over the paper in 2012, believing that it can benefit from sharing resources with the company's other properties -- the Examiner and SF Weekly.

"I was excited to see if the Guardian could be a part of the long-term stability and growth of this unique media partnership. Since then, I have come to realize that this isn't possible and that the obstacles for a profitable Bay Guardian are too great to overcome," Zuehls wrote.

Guardian editor Steven T. Jones told SF Weekly the staff was "in shock."

"We're still trying to stay cool. We're still trying to absorb this," he told the paper. "We are in discussions of the possibility of buying the paper. We'll turn to our community and try to see if this is possible."

Zuehls said the company is open to selling the paper. "Anybody can come and ask," he told SF Weekly.

Founded in 1966 by Bruce Brugmann and his wife, Jean Dibble, the Bay Guardian prided itself on its progressive politics and vowed to "print the news and raise hell." The couple sold the paper in 2012 to the San Francisco Media Co., which subsequently bought competitor SF Weekly.

Signs of trouble at the Bay Guardian have been bubbling for some time. Last year, Tim Redmond, its longtime editor and publisher, stepped down after he refused to further cut the paper's staff, according to San Francisco Business Times.