Photo: The former MGM film exchange at Hyde and Eddy streets in San Francisco. Credit: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
The Bay Citizen used the upper photo with the story while NYTimes.com used the lower photo. I might have gone with the top photo.
Photo: Old film vaults at the former Motion Picture Studio and Laboratory. Credit: Lianne Milton/The Bay Citizen
Although the image from Google maps’ street view shows more detail of the building.
As newspapers continue to grapple with online/print content and the future of the industry, one of the more unusual answers is reflected in a story that appears in the New York Times and the Bay Citizen of San Francisco, which provides print and online content in partnership with the NYT.
The item in question is a look at former film distribution sites in San Francisco, written by Adithya Sambamurthy. The story appears in the Local Intelligence column of the Bay Citizen and uses the same title in the New York Times. A note at nytimes.com says: A version of this article appeared in print on July 31, 2011, on page A23B of the National edition with the headline: Hollywood Film Exchanges: Tenderloin, San Francisco. Presumably that is the version distributed in San Francisco, as it’s not in my copy.
And frankly, the story is not much more than some extended captions; pretty thin on content.
Bay Citizen, founded in 2010, is new to me, and perhaps it’s the wave of the future – or it could be another interesting, but failed experiment. Alexa says: Baycitizen.org is ranked #54,070 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. Approximately 70% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). The site’s visitors view 1.7 unique pages each day on average. The fraction of visits to Baycitizen.org referred by search engines is about 12%. Compared with the overall internet population, the site’s audience tends to be higher-income; it also appeals more to childless college graduates and women browsing from work.
NEWS
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is returning 19 items taken from the tomb of King Tut. AP via Washington Post.
MUSEUMS
Kate Galbraith of the New York Times visits the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock, Texas.
The Wabash Valley Vision and Voices project is digitizing historic material from central Indiana and east central Illinois. Photo: Civil War diary of John E. Wilkins. Credit: Wabash Valley Visions and Voices.
The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat lovingly prepared from Twitter feeds by the bots at paper.li
ladailymirror.com 
Today’s photos have inadvertently answered an unspoken question buried in my mind for quite some time. I often wondered why ABC chose that very section of San Francisco’s infamous Tenderloin District to build its owned and operated TV studios in the early fifties. Now I understand. ABC was born as a spinoff of Paramount Theaters. Every major city of the era had a film exchange district of its own to service each studio’s theater group. They were centrally located and usually in a low rent district. That part of the infamous Tenderloin must have been where the film exchanges were. And the Paramount Theater’s Exchange must have been nearby. As Bob Hope once sang in a Paramount picture, “Thanks for the Memory”.
LikeLike
Oh gosh, I hope this isn’t the wave of internet based news, because if so, it will be the twitterization of news, 144 bits of information, basically just a brand of haiku. Where is the detail, the facts, the coherent story, the who, what, when, where, why, and not just a few odd bits of information strewn together?
LikeLike
@Mary: paper.li is something I’m experimenting with because the aggregators (like Google news and even Huffington Post ) are one of the things that is killing newspapers. I’m curious as to how well the bots do in selecting and positioning news.
LikeLike