In the Bay Area, free daily newspapers are providing an essential service, covering local stories ignored by the dominant dailies.
But a review of local stories in the three most prominent free tabloids suggests the quality of reporting falls well short of the journalism provided by newspapers you purchase. The giveaway dailies often push inexperienced, underpaid reporters to churn out short articles that lack context, adequate sources and initiative.
The people who run those papers -- the Palo Alto Daily News chain, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Mateo Daily Journal -- acknowledge that what they are doing isn't likely to win them any Pulitzer Prizes. They are publishing, as the Examiner's former Chairman Robert Starzel noted this spring, a different kind of paper -- a 20-minute "quick read." Or as Will Harper, an occasional media critic at the free weekly East Bay Express put it, "not especially good coverage but ... a meaningful contestant for my 30 minutes of burrito-eating time."
That might not matter if these mini-dailies remained a marginal phenomenon. But today free papers are growing faster in the Bay Area and the rest of the country than any other kind of newspaper. Journalists see them as harbingers of changes in the craft, with wide-reaching implications for the quality of information available to the public.
The people these papers quote most frequently split in their opinion of whether local citizens are better or worse off with the free tabloids. Politicians are generally pleased that the volume of local coverage available to residents has expanded, affording them a powerful new way to communicate with their constituents.
"I frankly think that the more the better," said Rich Gordon, president of the San ...