A newspaper to inspire you all over again

I stood in line with half a dozen people yesterday waiting patiently to buy a newspaper, wondering if I ever would witness anything like that again.

It was inspiring to see people eagerly scoop up a paper so fat with news that you had to take care that some of its 12 sections didn’t come tumbling out.

And the paper indeed was fat with news, real news. Real stuff I didn’t know about. Real stuff about my city, my country and my world. Real stuff I hadn’t heard anywhere else.

The paper was the one-time-only issue of the San Francisco Panorama, a broadsheet produced – as sort of a cross between a statement and a stunt – by McSweeney’s, the refreshingly idiosyncratic publishing house operating in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Most of the 20,000 copies of the $5 paper sold out without hours of hitting the street on Tuesday, which some newspaper people seized as a sign that even the hip, jaded and highly wired residents of San Francisco still cared about newspapers.

But the depth and ambition of this newspaper, whose price bumped to $16 on Wednesday and still is being offered here, were unlike anything you’ll see nowadays in most American cities.

While the enthusiastic response to Panorama cannot rightfully be construed as a vote of confidence in contemporary newspapers, it is well worth examining by publishers and editors eager to put new life into their increasingly lifeless publications.

And it is well worth celebrating by all of us who love newspapers, because it reminds us of how compelling a newspaper can be.

Smartly reported, sharply written and striking to behold, Panorama brims with passion and compassion for the Bay Area and the larger world we – and our kids – all inhabit.

Though Panorama is presented as a very broad broadsheet printed on newsprint, it reworks and updates the conventional format of a newspaper. Articles are long and written a in a literary, un-telegraphic style. Layouts emphasize storytelling, not story count. Most important of all, the content is meaty and provocative.

A page-one investigative piece as fine as I have seen in years ripped the lid off the inept reconstruction the long-overdue new bridge to Oakland. The project, Panorama predicted, eventually will cost $12 billion – or twice as much as we had been led to believe – “a figure that leaves even the officials in charge ‘staggered.’”

A second in-depth report details how the unbridled cultivation of illegal pot in scenic Mendocino County is poisoning wildlife, wrecking the environment, poaching scarce water assets and exploiting illegal immigrant workers. A report about gold mining in remote Imperial County tells a disturbing tale of environmental exploitation and corporate greed. Another piece delves deeply into the economics and politics of water in California, the scarcest commodity and the most politically charged issue in the state.

Farther from home, Panorama covered the wars in Afghanistan with short but incisive backgrounders, rounded out with first-person stories of two of the enlisted men bearing the brunt of the fighting – one of whom has served five tours at the front. A full-page infographic about the Congo crisis truly demonstrates how a picture can be worth thousands of words.

Perhaps the most moving feature in the publication was an article entitled “Lying to Live.” It is a series of translations of confessions extracted under torture from Iranian dissidents held at the infamous Evin Prison, where the only hope a prisoner has to survive is to tell the guards what they want to hear. “Jail officials’ kindness created a positive atmosphere in this jail, where I could think and get close to God,” said a statement attributed to journalist Saeed Shariati. His fate was not made clear.

Panorama didn’t stint on sports and entertainment, and even included two of the rarest things in most newspapers today: A 116-page, saddle-stitched Sunday magazine packaged in slick cover stock, plus a full-dress, 100-page, bound book section. Also included is a 16-page, full-color comics section containing nothing but deliciously edgy, home-grown strips.

Panorama even excelled in what it left out, eschewing the daily Tiger Woods hot-body count and coverage of the crashingly boring White House party crashers.

It’s not fair to measure conventional newspapers against the one-off issue of Panorama, which took 11 months to produce without the economic, staffing and deadline constraints increasingly encumbering most other publications.

But this experiment serves as a refreshing and inspiring reminder of the strength of journalism and the possibilities of print. Best of all, I am happy to report, the folks in line with me could hardly wait to read it.