The Commonwealth Club asked a panel of New Media start-ups to imagine San Francisco without a daily newspaper, and none of them could. At least that was the take of the SF Weekly’s Lois Beckett, who covered the discussion.

The problem, as Gannett Vice President for Innovation and Design Michael Maness pointed out, is that while new media sites still rely on old media, readers themselves are less interested in the traditional news coverage or City Hall reporting that mainstream media organizations provide.

Maness said Gannett recently conducted an anthropological study of the news habits of adults in 16 cities across the United States. What they heard over and over again, he said, was, “I’m tired of turning on the TV and hearing about two murders in a part of the city I couldn’t find on the map.”

After the panel, the Commonwealth’s Inforum announced their “New Face of SF Media” award winner: Jaimal Yogis, a journalist and author of Saltwater Buddha, who has written for San Francisco Magazine and The Bold Italic.

In his acceptance speech, Yogis said he hoped The Bold Italic was the future of San Francisco media, since it had given him a chance to write about swimming to Alcatraz and other adventures, which was much more fun than “trawling through documents and things.”