San Francisco Chronicle
The "Chronicle" was founded by brothers Charles and M. H. de Young in 1865 as "The Daily Dramatic Chronicle", and inside of 10 years, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of the Mississippi River. The paper's first office was in a building at the corner of Bush and Kearney Streets. The brothers then commissioned a building from Burnham and Root at 690 Market Street at the corner of Third and Kearney Streets to be their new headquarters, in what became known as Newspaper Row. The new building, San Francisco's first skyscraper, was completed in 1889. It was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, but it was rebuilt under the direction of William Polk, Burnham's associate in San Francisco. That building, known as the "Old Chronicle Building" or the "DeYoung Building", still stands and was restored in 2007. It is an historic landmark and is the location of the Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences.
San Francisco Independent
The publication was founded in 1958 as a neighborhood newspaper called the "Lake Merced Independent". Marsha Fontes, a local historian, took the reins in 1979. She sold it to Ted Fang and the Fang family in 1987. As editor and publisher, Fang almost immediately began growing the "Independent", expanding from a tabloid format into a standard broadsheet size newspaper and extending distribution citywide in 1988. In 1993, Fang purchased a chain of weeklies in San Mateo County owned by the "Chicago Tribune" and in 1998 all the publications were re-branded as "The Independent". In 2000, the Fang family purchased the "SF Examiner" and the Fangs became the first Asian American family to run a major daily newspaper in America.