Journalism in the Bay Area has been in decline for many years, with corporate consolidations, shrinking newsrooms, declining print readership, and struggles with how to pay full-time reporters when content is offered free-of-charge on the Internet. And with its waning institutional strength, the Fourth Estate has lost some of its ability to watchdog the powerful, creating a dangerous situation in a country founded on the belief that a free press is an essential safeguard of liberty and fairness.Read more »

Something to make you feel better about all your compulsive newsfeed scanning: Facebook is watching you, too. And just like you as you click through so-and-so's party photos from last weekend, it's getting judge-y.Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco's future is in the process of being written, once again using lines of computer code and blips on the screens of electronic gadgets, the same as during the last dot-com boom. Its proponents insist it will be different this time — that Boom 2.0 won't displace the working class, that the bubble won't burst — but critics have their doubts.Read more »

news@sfbg.com

A complicated civil lawsuit alleging corruption and fraud and involving several prominent current and former city officials — including Mayor Ed Lee, who took the witness stand to discuss actions he took as city purchaser a decade ago — could end up costing city taxpayers as much as $10 million.Read more »

marke@sfbg.com

Somehow, we thought we'd timed it perfectly. We'd saved up for decades (or at least my husband had — I'm a writer). We've lived in San Francisco for close to 20 years, sometimes holding down three jobs at a time and spending every available hour enmeshing ourselves in the cultural fabric of the city. Mortgage rates are insanely low; credit is loosening up again. We're not looking for anything extra-fancy, just somewhere with a little charm to finally set down financial roots and maybe even have enough room to start a family.Read more »

Christina Olague, the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, faces a difficult balancing act. She was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, whom she supported as co-chair of the controversial "Run Ed Run" campaign, to fill the vacancy in District 5, an ultra-progressive district whose voters rejected Lee in favor of John Avalos by a 2-1 margin.Read more »

news@sfbg.com

Sup. Jane Kim has introduced legislation to the Board of Supervisors calling for a re-examination of the San Francisco Police Department's participation in some aspects of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was created by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to do domestic surveillance.Read more »

yael@sfbg.com

Google has come under fire in the past year for everything from privacy policies to censorship. But in December, some Bay Area residents were protesting the tech giant for a very different reason. The group that marched in front of the company's San Francisco office was angry over the company's donation to organizations fighting human trafficking.

The flyers declared, "Google: Please fund non-judgmental services for sex workers, NOT the morality crusaders that dehumanize us!"Read more »

Early in April, a nine-member task force most San Franciscans have never heard of will draw lines that could change local politics for a decade. The Redistricting Task Force is using the 2010 U.S. Census data to adjust supervisorsial districts to reflect changes in the city's population. Some shifts are dramatic — the area now covered by District 6 has some 25,000 new residents, and will have to shrink. Others will have to grow. Read more »

yael@sfbg.com

Feb. 1 marks the first day that San Francisco and other California cities no longer have redevelopment as a tool for building affordable housing or dealing with urban blight, but questions remain about how the power and functions of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) will now be used.

On Dec. 29, the California Supreme Court upheld the validity of Assembly Bill 26, which dissolved all redevelopment agencies throughout the state and redirected the property tax revenue they accumulated to prevent deep cuts to public schools.Read more »