'Monarch' steps down from 113-year-old throne

The Examiner's owner, the Hearst Corp., bought the Chronicle for $660 million four months ago - a deal that compelled the company to relinquish control of the San Francisco paper that launched its publishing empire in 1887.

The Examiner bid farewell to its readers with a final edition that bore the banner headline "Goodbye." The paper also included an eight-page special section with a package of final columns.

The prospect of working at the much-larger Chronicle has triggered a gamut of emotions, ranging from giddy anticipation to fitful dread, among the 220 reporters, editors, photographers and other personnel that will be making the move.

As they approached their final deadline at the afternoon paper Tuesday, though, most of the workers couldn't help but be anything but sad.

"Part of me has died today," said Examiner police reporter Malcolm Glover, who was hired at the paper 57 years ago as a photographer by William Randolph Hearst.

"You get a tough skin on the police beat because you see so many things. But nothing has ever hit me like this - except for a death in the family."

To help the Examiner employees mourn, Hearst scheduled a rollicking wake to be held in an alley that has separated the Examiner building from the Chronicle offices for decades.

The party, featuring food and an open bar, was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. Tuesday and end just a few hours before many Examiner employees were scheduled to report to their first day on the job Wednesday morning at the Chronicle.

As another tonic, Hearst also passed out $2,000 bonuses to each of the newsroom employees who collected their final Examiner paychecks Tuesday, but the money wasn't enough to ease the heartache.

Judy Canter, the Examiner's head librarian, said she is still grieving over the loss of the paper's archives, which include 11 million stories, 7 million photos and curt one-sentence orders issued by William Randolph Hearst.

As part of the Examiner's sale, Hearst agreed to turn over the paper's archives to Fang, in addition to a $66 million subsidy that will be paid during the next three years.

"This is heavy stuff. I shed a lot of tears about losing the library. I just sobbed," said Canter, who worked at the Examiner for 22 years.

Others were more sanguine about the changing of the guard.

"It's definitely a sad day, but you can't get too nostalgic about it. It's just a job," said Examiner technology writer Alan Saracevic.

Showing a touch of the flippant humor typical in the newspaper industry, several employees wore special Examiner shirts proclaiming the paper as a "civic treasure" on the front and equating it to "toilet paper" on the back.

The descriptions were cribbed from public comments made by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who spent several years lambasting the Examiner for its hard-hitting coverage of his administration. When Hearst indicated it would close the paper last year if no buyers were found, Brown later hailed the Examiner as a community jewel that had to be saved.

Fang, the Examiner's new owner, is a staunch Brown backer.

Like most papers, the Examiner had a love/hate relationship with both its readership and many of the people that it covered.

In its early years, the paper often served as a bully pulpit for the agenda of the opinionated Hearst, known as "The Chief" or the "Old Man" around the Examiner newsroom.

Hearst quickly established the Examiner as one of the country's most flamboyant papers in the country.

"We must be alarmingly enterprising, and we must be startingly original. We must be honest and fearless," Hearst wrote shortly after taking command of the paper.

Under Hearst, the Examiner employed some of literature's best-known names, including Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mark Twain and, more recently, Hunter Thompson. The paper also introduced "Casey At The Bat" to the country by publishing Ernest Thayer's famous poem in 1888.

Even though it was much smaller, the Examiner frequently scooped the Chronicle with hard-hitting exposes on government waste, corruption and cronyism that many mainstream papers eschewed.

"I like to think we were the last alternative daily paper in the country," said Examiner Executive Editor Phil Bronstein, who will hold the same title at the Chronicle. "We are going to take that spirit with us."