A short guide to San Francisco

San Francisco's Coit Tower atop Telegraph HIll, as viewed from Russian Hill

Fog poured like milk from the northwest over the Marin Headlands toward the orange icon spanning Golden Gate and in minutes blotted both from view, then just as quickly raced across San Francisco Bay and vanished on approach to Oakland, the burnished glow across the water restored.

"It's like that here," a 30-year Bay Area resident told me later. "People say, wherever they are, wait 10 minutes and the weather will change. Here, it's literally true."

San Francisco proper is home to nearly 4 million people who already know this and maybe blot it from their minds as they struggle against the nerve-fraying tide of traffic and tourists. But to the wide-eyed ignorant such as myself, years removed from his last visit, this glittering jewel around a rocky, rolling thumb of land 47 miles square has abundant capability to impress and mesmerize.

Those capabilities are triggered first by the weather, which visitors notice the moment they debark from whatever they're riding. Upon my arrival, I was a five-hour flight removed from a sticky, 100-degree summer that had not varied much in a month. Yet the air swirling around the open jet door at San Francisco International was half as hot, hardly sticky and sweetened by salty plumes wafting from the sea. Exposed to it fully 10 minutes later, and feeling chilled 10 minutes thereafter, I realized I never thought to pack a jacket or light coat because I believed summer to be much the same everywhere. In fact, San Francisco never really has a summer as the rest of know it, and never really has a winter, either. It warms most noticeably in September and October between the waves of ever-present, sea-smelling fog, and snow is as rare here as it is in, say, Los Angeles. Fortunately, light fleece windbreakers with "SF" stitched into the breast are as abundant as sea gulls and apparently popular enough even among locals that it's possible for visitors to blend into the street crowds.

And, boy, are there crowds, up one hill and down another, lining the Embarcadero, munching at Ghirardelli's, and bobbing atop packed ferries plying the bay. At times, one might wonder if the whole world is here, and judging by the variety of languages heard in the hotels and restaurants and sightseeing excursions have justifiable cause to believe that's possible. It turned out that the time I visited, mid-August, coincided with the height of "holiday" across Europe, when virtually everyone there who can pursues a change of scenery. Thus, I heard in a place halfway around the world from our mother continent  British English and French, German and Portuguese, Russian and Greek, as well as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, variations on Arabic, and almost as many American dialects as there are Americans. Much of that verbal polyglot was just at Fisherman's Wharf, the former home of one industry, actual fishing, and now home to another, tourism and T-shirt shops and sea lions who sun themselves on floating docks near the shopping-mall-themed Pier 39. Thus, the former Yerba Buena, founded by Spanish colonists in 1776 and forced to grow up fast in the wake of the California Gold Rush a mere 73 years later, is as much a city of the world as London, Paris or Prague.

Also much like those cities, San Francisco also has the trouble of the world heaped on its 44 hilly shoulders: poverty amid plenty. Walk in any direction and chances are good one will see examples of homlessness and despair within a block or two of starting out. The 30-year resident told me he has watched his color-dappled metropolis, once mildly busy, transform into one streaked with grime, beset by gridlock and rife with homeless. This all happened over the last decade and a half, he said, behind the first tech boom-turned-bust rolling out of nearby Silicon Valley, when jobs dried up but the skyrocketing cost of living did not. A subsequent smaller tech boom in the late 2000's improved matters somewhat, but San Francisco remains in the throes of a swelling gentrification that has pushed all but small portions of the city beyond the reach of middle-income Americans. The 30-year resident himself pays over $1,000 per month for less than 1,000 square feet of living space.

"I don't like what I've seen," he said. "In some respects, it's not a pretty place anymore. But I can't imagine living anywhere else. Most people who live here can't imagine that, either."

Tourists are left to imagine plenty, however, with such sights and scents as San Francisco has. There's the aforementioned Golden Gate Bridge, a symbol of America as much as the city, and Coit Tower, the stunning art deco topper on Telegraph Hill and probably the best urban beautification project one can conjure. The Transamerica Pyramid remains San Francisco's tallest structure, though the insurance holding company that gave it that name no longer resides there. And hill after hill is shrouded in the curious mix of Victorian and modern architecture recognized as uniquely San Franciscan.

As for scents, one also wonders how an upstart restaurateur can make it around here. The city's eclectic epicurean opportunities are as many and varied as its visitors and they too occupy nearly every street corner, thankfully crowding out the chain gangs that unartfully decorate American suburbia. In Chinatown, of course, sits a raft of good food served up by greasy spoons as well as finely appointed eateries, but there is a wealth of international cuisine dotting the other 60-plus neighborhoods on the peninsula. I liked Au Roi, a cozy Thai place on Post Street near Lower Nob Hill, that serves to-die-for salads, and Caffe Roma Coffee Roasting Co. on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, where java lovers will find a powerful house blend that cuts through a drinker's foggy morning like a gale. My spouse, on the other hand, fell in love with Salty's Fishwich near Pier 41, where, served through a street side window, one can order a hunk of haddock wrapped in seasoned slaw and served on a huge bun. We ate there twice.

So, to summarize, I would advise bringing with you to San Francisco a camera, a healthy appetite and a tolerance for scenes of despair. Above all, bring a jacket. Because no matter the time of year, it gets chilly here.

Will fewer copy editors mean more lawsuits?

A friend of mine lost his job as the economy began careening along a precipice. He was laid off after his employer's accountants, perhaps fearing for their own job security, removed the welcome mat one morning as he approached from the parking lot.

At the front door, guards who knew my friend on a first-name basis greeted him cordially, took his security pass and presented him with a water-stained cardboard box filled with his belongings. Nobody was there to say thank you for his decade of commitment and loyalty; the guards had performed the same curt ceremony two dozen times already over the past six months.

The day after my friend's exit, a brace of attorneys visited his now-former employer. Not because he had hired legal eagles in response. Instead, these attorneys were sniffing for negligence and thought they might smell blood in the building. Because the night my friend was laid off, the employer made a critical error that went public.

My friend, you see, had been a newspaper copy editor. His job, simply stated, was to ensure other people looked good. He caught reporters' errors and corrected them before publication, and by extension made the newspaper look good. But before his last night at work the editing staff already suffered a shortage of bodies. News stories that should have been scrutinized closely were pushed through in a hurry to meet a deadline. So on the first night he was gone, some errors were missed, including a libelous one that wound up in print and online the next morning before an estimated 1 million sets of eyes. The attorneys showed up at the front desk before the security guard had finished his morning coffee.

Today, the newspaper still publishes and it has laid off more employees, perhaps to defray legal costs. My friend found a new job outside of journalism. He corrects errors now in the private sector. How much money was required to solve the newspaper's libel problem, I do not know; maybe enough to have kept my friend and a couple other copy editors on the payroll a year or more.

Now, sure, there's no telling that the newspaper would have avoided trouble for certain had my friend still been there. But fewer editors tends to mean more errors, and not just at newspapers. A recent New York Times article cited book publishers' propensity for cutting corners as the reason for the rise of spelling and other errors in books and manuscripts. These publishers used to have copy editing staffs, too. Another report, this one by the BBC, highlighted an entrepreneur's claim that spelling errors on merchants' websites in the United Kingdom have drastically curtailed online sales there.

And this all matters … how? Well, the point of editing, of perfecting one's communication, hews to professionalism. A lack of errors implies attention to detail that extends to other services and products. Sure, we all want to see our names and our kids' names published in the paper properly, if for no other reason than personal pride or bragging rights. At the same time, we want drug manufacturers and home builders and airplane mechanics to work with accurate printed information, because communication errors in those fields require much more than a printed correction.

The people who collect and disseminate information for print, online and broadcast have come under considerable pressure lately. Their numbers have dwindled, they're forced to do more with fewer resources and they must perform faster and longer in this burgeoning, 24-hour-deadline world. Volume matters and speed matters in that world, yet fewer watchdogs are standing by to account for accuracy and credibility. Meanwhile, media conglomerates continue to reap prodigious profits year after year, in large part through savings gained through editor layoffs.

I wonder then about the target-rich environment for litigators this shaving for savings' sake creates. You see, news copy editors not only push for proper spelling and grammar, they also are trained to recognize nuance, particularly where slander and libel are concerned. The case used to be at many news publications that copy editors were paid more than reporters because they were considered to be like the armor on a tank ‒ protection. It has been said that all copy editors make good reporters, but not all reporters make good copy editors.

This philosophy persisted in print journalism until the Internet brought publishing to everyone's desktop and made anyone with a half-formed thought, a keyboard and an Internet connection capable of sending “news” circling the globe in seconds. While all of us were agog over the potential, there rose the misconception that the “delete” key cured all ills.

But electronic words are like hard lead on cheap notebook paper; the erasure never comes off completely. Our Web marks, once made, leave an impression that delete keys cannot expunge, and that impression can last decades. And as the technology improves, so does the ease at plucking out these stray, unwanted marks after the fact, which then opens the question: Were these errors honest, or did they result from carelessness or negligence?

That distinction also is becoming easier to detect. Thus, the next question from an attorney might be: If copy editors were laid off for the sake of saving a few dollars, might that act alone constitute contributory negligence?

I imagine that one day soon there will be a brace of attorneys knocking on the door to test that possibility. Look at the empty copy editing desks around you and pray your publication can pass the test.