About Steve

Viewpoints from the Publisher's View

40th AnniversaryAugust Issue, 2010, Potrero View

By Steven J. Moss

The View turns 40 this month, an age I thought ancient when I was in college, but now, as I look 50 in the face, seems young to me.  Yet, in this age of technology, 40 is a lot of years.  When the View was first published mimeographs were state-of-the-art reproduction technology.  Dial telephones were au courant.  Talking, as opposed to texting, was the primary communication mode.  Just six years ago the View was produced through the cut and paste method, using scissors and a glue stick, not an electronic icon.

Technology isn’t the only thing that’s changed.  Ruth Passen, Lester Zeidman, Abigail Johnston, and other stalwarts knitted the View together over Goat Hill pizza and long discussions about politics, neighborhood issues, and proper grammar.  The production process, filled with last minute changes, kibitzing, and the physical creation of layouts, hand-carried to the local printer, was almost as important as the product itself.  Many of the paper’s volunteers had deep ties to the labor movement, and understood that the act of creation – whether the construction of a ship, or the teaching of a class – was an honorable one.  Labor was love; the paper its child.

Today’s production process is quite different.  I’ve never met many of the View’s writers.  Assignments are handed-out over email or telephone.  Layout is done using Adobe InDesign.  The end result is electronically transferred to our still local printer.  The focus is the product, not the making of it.  When I hear about the paper’s glory days of late-night editing and in-the-trenches camaraderie, I get wistfully jealous.  But then I get back to work doing what needs to be done to get a small profitless paper on the streets every 30 days while raising a family and earning a living.  This stubborn dedication to publishing the View is perhaps the essential link in a 40 year chain.   

Other things remain the same.  We continue to take our editing job seriously, with at least three sets of eyes examining every article.  For four decades, un- or under-paid View staff have worried over what topics to cover, and how well we’ve done it.  At 40 years old, there’s still the feeling that we’re making things up as we go.  And we are.  There was no guide to how to publish a neighborhood newspaper in 1970, and there’s still no guide today.  An examination of the other dozen and half community newspapers issued in San Francisco suggest a range of possible content, including restaurant gossip, bad jokes, and reprinted columns from local politicians.

The View stands virtually alone among its publication peers in its willingness to regularly report on difficult community issues.  This is dangerous territory, which can sometimes feel like telling secrets about family members.  After all, chances are I or another contributor will bump into the subject of a less than laudatory article in the produce section of The Good Life Grocery, or while having coffee at Farley’s.  It’d be easier, and maybe even better, to keep the paper’s focus narrow, to the sighting of a bird’s nest in a local park, or the tastiness of the goods at a neighborhood bakery.  But the View was born from the activist’s soul of the 1960s, emerging from a desire to stir things up to make a better stew.  Sometimes we use the wrong recipe, but our heart is in the right place:  dedicated to serving the community reliable news about the neighborhood that no one else is covering.          

The View has as much a familial tang as a journalistic one.  Where else can we read about the people who’ve inhabited our hill, our neighborhood businesses, and the political skirmishes over land use, power plants, and parks?  In what other publication can we see photographs of our children’s faces, smiling back at us as they celebrate a birthday or graduation?   What makes the View special is that it’s rooted in a particular place, in which history intermingles comfortably with what’s next.  In a world where time seems to be speeding up, and collective consciousness lasts as long as a movie trailer, every month the View declares that we are here, living our complex, rich, challenging lives, exquisitely curious about the world around us.