If it does not drastically reduce costs or find a buyer, Hearst has threatened to close the San Francisco Chronicle. It's a scary scenario for media loving hippies in the Bay Area, but not an unfamiliar one. Every newspaper is looking at ways to cut costs, or sell itself, to risk foreclosure. It's just that Hearst has said it so explicitly that panic abounds.

The Chronicle lost $50 million last year. That is a shit ton of money for a newspaper that doesn't truly play on the national level. It's also endemic of the industry: The publisher of the The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News is in Chapter 11; the Journal Register, which owns 20 dailies and 159 other newspapers, also joined that club over the weekend.

Hearst bought the Chronicle back in 2000 from the de Young family, a powerful and extroidinarily wealthy clan that has its name on much of San Fran, including the new museum there. Famous for hosting the Zodiac Killer's letters in the 1960s, the paper has seen steady declines in readers, like every newspaper. Working against it, meanwhile, is its Internet branding problem: The Chronicle's website is actually SFGate.com.

There's no precise timeline set for the possible closure, but Hearst has warned it could come in just a few months. Making the declaration is a pretty gutsy move — or the canniest way to force its employees' union to make concessions it otherwise wouldn't if all their jobs weren't so clearly on the line. Interesting, then, that Hearst says the paper will die if it can't come to terms with the union, but still has contracts to move the Chronicle to a new state-of-the-art printing press in June.

Which means between now and then, expect huge newsroom gutting, salary reductions, benefits reduced to nothing, and a word from obnoxious print media death knell Jeff Jarvis cheerleading the Chronicle's demise.