San Francisco Herald

"The San Francisco Herald" was a free alternative newspaper in San Francisco, California. It is now a website, Cal-List.com. It was published every other month and then monthly and had no relation to the daily newspaper of the same name published in the 1800s. The Herald was started in summer 1998 by Gene Mahoney, who continues to edit and publish Cal-List.com today.

In 2001 the Herald won the SF Weekly's "Best Of" Independent Paper of the Year Award. Most of the articles were based on life in San Francisco, and several writers became popular in the area. The paper also served as an outlet for Mahoney's own comic pages, "Good Clean Fun", following the adventures of fictional characters Chauncy Dillinger and Lee Harvey Wembley, among others.

All of the writers/artists are friends of Gene Mahoney and contributed to the paper for free in an attempt to help it take off. The web site was, for several years, created and maintained by columnist James Dylan [http://www.graffiks.com] . Other regular writers were or still are Steven Capozzola [http://www.myspace.com/stevencap] , Kimberlye Gold [http://www.sfherald.com/columnists/gold/gold.html] , Howard Hallis, Ace Backwords, Lana Alattera [http://www.sfherald.com/columnists/alattera/alattera.html] , and Harris Rosenbloom [http://52mason.com/] . Kimberlye Gold has interviewed many prominent figures for the paper, including ex-Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, actor/comedian Richard Lewis, comedian Margaret Cho, 1970s band Bad Company and '80s band Berlin. (There is a running inside joke that Mahoney has a "crush" on Berlin's lead singer Terri Nunn, as she has appeared on the cover of the paper numerous times.) Gold also managed to attend several Mill Valley Film Festival's for the paper. The paper can be found in coffee-shops, restaurants and bars in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2006 the San Francisco Herald became simply another edition of the quarterly-published California Herald, as the distribution of the paper increased to many other areas of the Golden State. In addition to San Francisco, there were now separate editions of the Herald for Marin, north San Mateo, south San Mateo, Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Redwood City, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and Hollywood.

In summer 2007 the California Herald debuted editions in San Bruno, Oakland, Alameda, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Rosa, Burlingame, Los Gatos, Campbell, Mountain View, Menlo Park, South San Francisco, and San Carlos. Also in the summer of 2007, the San Francisco Herald broke up into nine editions for the following neighborhoods: North Beach, the Haight, the Mission, the Richmond, Pacific Heights, Polk Gulch, the Sunset, Diamond Heights, and Nob Hill.

As advertisers continued to abandon newspapers in favor of the Internet, the Herald ceased print publication, and on July 1, 2008 -- the ten year anniversary of the Herald -- Cal-List.com debuted.

External links

* [http://www.sfherald.com The San Francisco Herald]
* [http://www.californiaherald.net/ The California Herald]
* [http://www.sfherald.com/comics.html Gene Mahoney's "Good Clean Fun"]