San Francisco Herald

The San Francisco Herald is a newsletter/website in San Francisco, California, founded by Gene Mahoney. It was a newspaper from its debut in July 1998 until January 2008. As the newspaper/magazine industry rapidly crumbled due to declining advertising and readership, the Herald became a newsletter, with the longer articles and comics appearing solely on its website. The Herald was originally published every other month and then monthly. In its last years as a newspaper it went quarterly.

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 Bay 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.

Most of the writers/artists were friends of Gene Mahoney and contributed to the paper for free in an attempt to help it take off. The website was created and maintained by columnist James Dylan. 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 1980s band Berlin. (There was 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 was found in coffee-shops, restaurants and bars in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2006 The San Francisco Herald became 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 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 - and the recession of the first decade of the 21st century set in — The Herald ceased print publication. On July 1, 2008 — the tenth anniversary of the Herald — Cal-List.com (an online-only version of The Herald) debuted. In May 2009 — after ten months of Cal-List.com — it was deemed a failure and abandoned, and the San Francisco Herald newsletter debuted, distributed to the same locations as the newspaper version. The Herald's latest (its fourth) website, SanFranciscoHerald.Net, was also introduced. Revenue for The Herald is now made by the marketing of clients' products, services, and events, rather than the traditional model of print advertising.