Florence Fang, matriarch of San
Francisco's politically powerful Fang family and chairman of its newspaper
chain, yesterday fired her son, Ted, as editor and publisher of the San
Francisco Examiner, which has been buffeted by financial problems and
family infighting.
The move comes as seven construction
companies have filed more than $1.4 million in liens against ExIn LLC,
the Examiner's corporate parent, citing the failure to pay them for remodeling
work on the newspaper's offices in the old Warfield Theater on Market
Street.
The Fangs acquired the Examiner from
the Hearst Corp. last year in a controversial deal that shook the city's
political establishment and barely survived an anti-trust challenge in
federal court.
Hearst announced in August 1999 that
it would purchase The Chronicle and either sell the Examiner or close
it if no buyer could be found. But in January 2000, real estate investor
Clint Reilly sued to stop the sale, arguing that Hearst planned to shut
down the Examiner and create a San Francisco newspaper monopoly.
Hearst then agreed to transfer the
Examiner to the Fang family, publisher of the San Francisco Independent,
the weekly Asian Week and other small papers in the Bay Area. The deal
included a subsidy from Hearst to the Fangs of up to $67 million over
three years.
But Reilly pressed his suit through
a monthlong trial that finally ended in favor of Hearst and the Fangs
in July 2000. When the Fangs took over the Examiner, both Ted Fang and
the media made much of the fact that it was the nation's first major metropolitan
newspaper owned by an Asian American family.