The Examiner reports today that the Bay City News Service is leaving its Market Street home in San Francisco for slightly smaller digs in Oakland due to a rent hike.
Tech businesses are bidding up the price of office space in San Francisco, and BCN wasn’t able to find a place that fit in its budget.
“Our landlord here has proposed almost doubling our rent,” Wayne Futak, BCN’s general manager, told the Examiner. “We don’t plan to change our coverage at all by being in Oakland, just fiscally it’s less expensive.”
Dan McMenamin, BCN’s managing editor, is quoted as saying that the move won’t diminish the wire service’s coverage.
“We are a regional news service, so we didn’t see a need to stay in San Francisco,” he said, adding later, “I don’t see it as a huge deal.”
BCN provides news stories and calendar items to about 100 newspapers, radio stations, television newsrooms and websites.