SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Chronicle joined the lengthening list of imperiled newspapers Tuesday as its owner set out to purge the payroll and slash other expenses in a last-ditch effort to reverse years of heavy losses.
If it can’t reduce expenses drastically within the next few weeks, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the Chronicle, northern California’s largest newspaper, with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430.
Hearst didn’t specify a savings target or a deadline for wringing out the expenses. A Hearst spokesman didn’t immediately respond to messages Tuesday.
But management made it clear that the cost-cutting will require a significant number of layoffs.
“Our current situation dictates that we accomplish these cost savings quickly,” Chronicle publisher Frank Vega wrote in a memo to the staff. “Business as usual is no longer an option.”
The Chronicle has given Hearst financial headaches since the New York-based company bought the newspaper in a complex deal valued at $660 million. The late-2000 acquisition proved to be ill-timed.
After losing more than $50 million last year, Hearst said, the Chronicle is off to an even worse start this year as advertisers clamp down on their marketing budgets and increasingly divert more money to the Internet.
Several other newspapers around the country are facing a fate similar to the Chronicle’s.
Just last month, Hearst laid out plans to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer isn’t found before April. A similar fate awaits E.W. Scripps Co.’s Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Gannett Co.’s Tucson Citizen in Arizona unless buyers are found.
But there would still be at least one large daily newspaper left in those other big cities where publishers are mulling a shutdown.
The only other daily newspaper in San Francisco — a city with a population of about 800,000 — is the Examiner, which is given away for free. Hearst owned the San Francisco Examiner but sold it for $100 and provided the new owners with a $67 million subsidy as a condition for completing the Chronicle acquisition.
