As reported in the NY Times on Monday, Boston is dealing with the threatened loss of the Globe by searching its collective soul and wondering what the closure would say about its city. “Boston’s not a podunk town,” the article quoted one resident saying. “It’s got to have a good paper.”

The fact that the NY Times company, which owns the Globe, is the one doing the threatening has to add to the insult (kind of like Al Qaeda News running a think piece on 9.11) but what struck me, as a former resident of San Francisco, is why that city has not responded in similar fashion to the threatened demise of its only real news daily, the SF Chronicle?

Local blogs such as Ghost Word have followed the unraveling, as reporters and editors take buyouts and flee, and the Hearst company’s threats to close the paper have received international attention. But I don’t get the feeling that people there are losing much sleep over the potential loss.

“Nobody reads it,” is the reaction I get when I ask people there about the Chron. (The only other daily is the former Hearst sheet the , before the rivals switched identities, in a sci-fi scenario few could have imagined, in 1999; today the Ex is the kind of thing you line your birdcage with if you don’t like your bird.) Does that make SF a “podunk town,” in the words of the Boston lady?

Residents would bristle at the suggestion but it was a long-standing irony of the SF Bay Area that, with a wealthy, literate audience of media mavens, the City That Knows How has never been able to sustain a world-class newspaper, let alone a magazine. In the seventies, I worked at a news kiosk/bookstore there and sold countless copies of -- the New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, the New York Times, even the Village Voice. While Focus, SF, the Chronicle et al languished on the floor until we bound them up to return them to the distributor, or throw them in the trash.

Inferiority complex? Hardly. No one feels more certain about their choice of habitat than San Franciscans (which is probably why so much of the local media is dedicated to reminding people of what a great place they live). And its not lack of creativity. Salon, for just one example, was born out of the newspaper strike of the early nineties and still has a strong local following. It is not, however, a purveyor of local news and does not want to bear the mantle of the Great Voice of Northern California (as the Chron called itself when I was a kid).

No one does, it seems. Why stay inside putting out a quality journal when it’s such a nice day? Let’s go to the beach and have a picnic. I’ll bring the latest New Yorker.