Clearly Phil Bronstein, the San Francisco Chronicle editor, relegates classical music to minimal or peripheral status. Perhaps his music critic argues for more space and coverage to no avail. Whatever the case, the Sunday Datebook section has not carried a classical music piece in many months, perhaps a year. The few published have basically been PR and celebrity interviews.

The point is that discourse in the press is needed to stimulate interest and involvement by the public and to encourage musical activity in the community. Editors have been known to argue that because most musical events are not repeated, reviews have no effect on ticket sales and therefore are unimportant. Those same editors do not apply that reasoning to sports events. They don't say that since baseball, basketball, and football games are unique, one-time occurrences, they should not be covered. Music patrons have at least as much interest as sports patrons in reading about their events, especially those they have attended.

The great tradition of journalism in San Francisco and the Bay Area is in fact responsible for the fact that the region enjoys the second-most active classical music and dance scenes on the continent (as voted by 150 music critics two years ago). From the beginning until the 1990s, San Francisco was a newspaper town. In the 1850s, the years immediately following the Gold Rush, there were 132 newspapers and journals in San Francisco. Many of them covered the already active classical music (and entertainment) scene consistently, using knowledgeable reviewers.

In 1880, with 21 papers still being published in San Francisco (compared to only four in Chicago), the city ranked third in the country in its ratio of people to newspaper copies (1.63 persons for each copy of a newspaper). The majority of its papers covered, supported, and even promoted the performing arts. Until the 1980s, there were daily newspapers in every town in the greater Bay Area, with three remaining in San Francisco. Most of them reviewed the performing arts. Andrew Porter, the British critic then writing for The New Yorker, observed that we had a larger music press than London's.

The indifference of publishers and editors, coupled with the digital revolution, has changed all that. Will the Internet and blogs make the difference? It doesn't seem likely, first because information read on the computer screen does not engage and hold the attention as closely as printed material; second because in traversing a newspaper, many readers become drawn to stories they had not been looking for, stories they may not click to on a Web publication. I would like to think that a good percentage of audience members would regularly take the extra step to go to the Internet to check out the review of what they had just heard in the concert hall or opera house, especially when the newspaper doesn't cover it. That may happen in time — SFCV is doing its job to encourage more of that — but for most people it's not an automatic or habitual response yet, not the way turning to the appropriate page of the newspaper used to be.

(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.)