The Examiner Review

When I first moved to San Francisco, I bought a copy of the SF Chronicle...THE San Francisco newspaper. I found it to be unwieldy: too many sections, lots of inserts from advertisers, way too many print ads, and too time-consuming to make my way through. Like many people in American cities, I ride public transportation to work every morning. I ride the train, and I like to read the newspaper while I'm riding. The ride takes me approximately 45 minutes, and I'd like to be able to get through the majority of the paper within that timeframe. It's not as if I can get to work, sit at my desk, and kick back to read the paper. The Chron didn't fit the bill.

Then I discovered The Examiner. The Examiner is a free newspaper that delivered to lots of homes in the Bay Area, and also available at newspaper boxes all overthe city. It delivers brief, but complete coverage of local, state and national issues, and most of the big, international stuff that I need to know on a daily basis. The writing is clean, succinct and to-the-point. Within the time it takes me to commute to work, I manage to read through the news, editorials, letters to the editor, business profiles and reports, and the entertainment and gossip sections. Sometimes I have time to work on the crossword puzzle. The fact that it's free is icing on the cake.

Let's face it - our needs, when it comes to print media, are changing. More and more people rely on television and the internet for in-depth coverage of world events. When it comes to the newspaper, a lot of us want short sound bytes...something we can read and understand quickly, especially if we're reading on the bus or train. With public transportation becoming more popular (yay for planet earth!) it's getting so that it's actually impossible to open up a big, broadsheet newspaper on a crowded subway car, weed through ads and inserts, and the multitude of sections.

The folks at The Examiner seem to really understand the needs of the average daily newspaper reader. The paper comes in the much more managable tabloid size. The bigger papers often direct the reader to "section D, page 47" for the end of an article that starts on page one.  Stories in The Examiner appear in their entirety over one or two successive pages. No fumbling around to find the last paragraph of a story - what an innovation! While The Examiner relies entirely on ads to operate, it's a rare thing to open it up an have four or five inserts of different sizes fall all over one's lap.

I'm not saying The Examiner is the be-all and end-all of media. I am saying it's the new face of daily print media. It provides me with exactly what I want in my morning paper. When it comes to in-depth coverage of world events and politics, I rely on various internet news outlets, BBC America, and CNN. But, when it comes to finding out how San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom has voted on a city referendum, or how schools in California might be affected by State and Federal funding cuts, or where Lindsay Lohan got drunk last night, I turn to The Examiner.