A One-Time Newspaper that Turned Heads

In San Francisco, they published a one-off that impressed everybody and they all lined up to buy it. Print newspapers aren’t dead, the story asserts, we just want them to be much better. This paper was called the San Francisco Panorama. It’s a big broadsheet in color with features about culture, and art and politics and investigations. They’ll print 20,000 copies at $5, and sell out.

Then people will pay up to $14…”a sign that even the hip, jaded and highly wired residents of San Francisco still cared about newspapers.” So this one time phenomenon will stand as a statement…a suggestion…of how it might be possible to dazzle and amaze people with newsprint.

I’m not sure why McSweeney’s Publishing House in Boston decided to spend 11 months writing what appears to be a one-shot deal. But the success can’t be ignored. Everyone just had to have one, it seems.