“The best idea I ever had, that never got acted on, was to have Hunter Thompson cover the O.J. Simpson trial,” Phil Bronstein tells MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman. At the time Bronstein was executive editor of the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. “We had an eight-hour negotiating session. Hunter wanted satellite dishes, an unlimited expense account and a suite or two at the Chateau Marmont. We were a dying afternoon paper with no budget.”

Bronstein, now editor at large of the Chron, tells Friedman that he’s still irked by that line in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men” that mocked the Chronicle. (Jason Robards, playing Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, dismisses an annoying salesmen who was pitching a feature on yesterday’s weather by saying: “Send it out to the San Francisco Chronicle — they need it.”) Some 33 years later, Bronstein says, “It showed an under-appreciation for the quirkiness of San Francisco … It was a case of East Coast snobbery.”

Friedman, who is based in New York, asks his readers at the end of the column to comment on what they like or dislike about the Chronicle. (Photo credit: Paul Harris)