The Central City Extra Brings Tenderloin to Life

In a part of San Francisco known for drug-dealing, homelessness and poverty, a local newspaper manages to find good news, accomplished people and signs of hope. The Central City Extra doesn’t ignore problems, but it’s not blinded by them, either.

By Jennah Feeley

San Francisco’s poorest neighborhood claims one of Northern California’s most respected local newspapers – The Central City Extra.

The Extra serves the Civic Center, the Tenderloin, and the Sixth Street corridor and is one of only two non-profit newspapers in the San Francisco Neighborhood Newspaper Association.

It has won first-place honors from the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club for both news and light feature coverage as well as third in overall excellence in the Newspaper Non-Dailies category. The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named The Extra the best community non-daily newspaper in 2011.

“SPJ covers the area from Sacramento to Salinas, so that’s why I say – we are the best community newspaper from Sacramento to Salinas,” said editor Geoffrey Link.

Link is the executive director of the San Francisco Study Center and has run The Extra since its inception in 2000. “We have always been in the middle of the neighborhood, so we’ve always identified with it. We never saw it as them and us.”

Richard and Rhoda Goldman sponsored a neighborhood improvement project in 1999 called the Lower Eddy/Leavenworth Task Force – a five-year undertaking to refine the Tenderloin neighborhood and bring the community together. The task force chose the San Francisco Study Center to take on production of a neighborhood newspaper.

It was assumed the paper would carry on the name Tenderloin Times, which had once been a respected newspaper in the neighborhood – but there was a desire to reach beyond the Tenderloin – a downtown neighborhood covering nearly 50 square blocks, bounded by Geary Street on the north, Mason Street on the east, Market Street on the south and Van Ness Avenue on the west.

“We decided if we took that up [the name Tenderloin Times] and identified only with the Tenderloin we would not really be serving that whole central city area,” Link said. “People nearby shared many of the same issues so we wanted to call it Central City Extra so our coverage could cross Market Street.”

The Tenderloin has for a long time been the lowest-income neighborhood in the city, a notoriously crime-ridden and downtrodden area. Given the neighborhood’s reputation, The Extra was given the challenge of rebuilding the community’s image.

“Very early on, we had a ‘Good News’ column because there was good news coming out of there. And later on we had something called ‘Tenderloin Stars’ where we would feature people who were doing really wonderful things,” said senior writer and editor Marjorie Beggs. “We weren’t trying to minimize the bad stuff, but we were trying to highlight some of the good stuff. But it was all just there.”

The Extra provides a sense of community in the neighborhood.

“A lot of our response comes from our obituaries – and it always has. We have been publishing them regularly since 2003. They are very well read and very appreciated by the community,” Beggs said.

The obituaries gained so much popularity among readers that The Study Center published them in a book called “Death in the Tenderloin.”

“The obituaries recognized people who are not recognized by and large while they are alive. We call it Death in the Tenderloin, but … it’s the retelling of the lives in the Tenderloin. So we look at it in a positive way, it’s the life of the Tenderloin too,” Link said.

The Extra’s audience includes residents of the Tenderloin neighborhood and the non-profit organizations that serve them. Many offices at City Hall receive hand-delivered papers every month, as well.

From the beginning, Link wanted to give the publication a more appealing design than typical newspapers. The Extra is printed on book paper rather than newsprint and features a more vertical design with color photographs.

“You don’t see it in the gutter, and you do see some of the other free newspapers in the gutter,” Link said.

Being a free paper in a poor neighborhood does not make for much monetary support.

“We are in the lowest-income neighborhood in the city with an aging population, not the kind of demographics that draw traditional ads because there is not much disposable income,” Link said. “We were – for the longest time – the only neighborhood newspaper with a full-time reporter and no advertising director.”

Beggs is the only regular staff member and freelancers contribute the rest of the writing. Being a monthly publication leaves room for stories to change over time and shift focus to stories other newspapers may have skipped.

“When you have a month to develop a story it is more difficult to know what your final size is going to be because what looked like nothing turned into something and what looked like nothing blows up in your face. Or all the big media folks pulled it out and put it in the news and we don’t want to cover it,” Beggs said.

Unlike many publications shifting their focus to online coverage, The Extra has no plans to go digital. Although scans of The Extra are available online, The Study Center doesn’t have the capital to support a large web presence. The community seems happy with the print version however, and Link plans to continue running the paper as is.

Link, who graduated from San Francisco State University, was hired by The Wall Street Journal right out of college. He worked at The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and spent four years as the editor of San Francisco Magazine. He has been a staff copy editor since 1975, first for The Examiner and then for The Chronicle in 2000 when Hearst Corp. bought it. He continues his job at The Chronicle while running The Extra.

“It’s been a wonderful opportunity to cover stories that wouldn’t otherwise be told,” Link said.

“Geoff is the guiding journalistic light for everybody who comes here,” Beggs said. “We wouldn’t be doing it without him.”

Jennah Feeley is a Northern California Media Museum writer majoring in journalism at San Francisco State. A Palo Alto native, she also works for a San Francisco startup in the Mission District.