I gotta say, as an impartial bystander that doesn’t much care for either newspaper, this whole grudge match between the SF Weekly and the SF Guardian is more entertaining than any grudge match going on in professional wrestling or any grudge match going on in hip-hop combined.
It also follows in the rich tradition of San Francisco newspapers talking shit and making enemies. And then getting shot.
From a recent story on SF Gate.
The late 1870s birthed one of the most infamous sex scandals in history, with all the trappings of power, lust and deadly gunplay.
It began when minister Isaac Kalloch moved here from back East to become a pastor. Tales of illicit sexual exploits trailed him, and when he ran for mayor, Chronicle Publisher Charles de Young went on an opposition warpath. “Driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper, his trial for adultery, his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple Choristers,” read one of the headlines. Kalloch railed back that de Young was, according to “The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco” by Charles Adams: “The bastard progeny of a whore, born in the slums and nursed in the lap of prostitution.”
An infuriated de Young shot Kalloch in 1879, but Kalloch recovered and was elected mayor. Kalloch’s son was a better shot: He gunned de Young down in the newspaper office the next year, killing him.
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And then, from Michael Henry de Young’s wikipedia page –
He (M. H. de Young) moved with his family to San Francisco, California while he was still young. There, he and his brother, Charles de Young, founded the Daily Dramatic Chronicle newspaper, first published on January 16, 1865. The Chronicle was the predecessor of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco’s only remaining daily broadsheet newspaper. De Young was also the director of the Associated Press for many years.
In 1884, he was shot by an irate businessman, Adolph B. Spreckels, apparently due to a negative newspaper article, but survived.
The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is named in his honor.
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Fucking Hardcore.
The Outer Sunset 