Dog Bites

Then it dawned on us: Friday, the Fangxaminer had congratulated itself on its 100th day of existence. Actually, when we'd made our own count on the little calendar on the back of our checkbook register, we got 101 days, but what really interested us was the paper's front-page note claiming "impressive gains" in circulation. Back when the F-Ex first began publishing, we'd staked out a couple of local newsstands, asking patrons whether they'd been picking up the new paper. The answer, uniformly, was no. Had things changed?

"No way. If you never bothered to read the Independent, why would you pay 25 cents for the Examiner?" answered the first person we asked, a ponytailed man browsing magazines at Juicy News who wouldn't give his name but said we could describe him as the Anonymous Red-Haired Guy.

Mo Salimi, Juicy News' Fillmore Street manager, said the store had stopped carrying the Ex. "As far as I know, it's just been cancelled," he said. "I have to call the distributor to see what's going on."

Maybe people were just suffering from cabin fever, but everyone we asked seemed happy to discuss his or her newspaper reading habits and the reasons for them. An older man pushing one of those all-terrain strollers said he occasionally bought the Chronicle, but never picked up the Ex. "I really like the Mercury News," he said. "I consider it to be the best local newspaper."

"The [Ex's] headlines..." an elegantly-dressed woman answered, then trailed off. "It's kind of -- tabloid-y. It's like there's no real news in it."

In order to recreate the original survey conditions as exactly as possible, we followed up by heading over to our favorite newsstand, Polk Street's Smoke Signals, where a trenchcoated Zelig Prudowsky said he hadn't looked at the Ex in months. "I picked up one or two copies at the beginning, and I said forget it," he said. "You could look in the newsboxes and see it was three days old. It just turned me off."

One customer browsing the magazines told us he -- gasp! -- doesn't buy newspapers at all: "I read what I need to on the internet," he explained. A minute later, a blond woman carrying a New York Times told Dog Bites she isn't interested in local news.

Smoke Signals owner Fadi Berbery -- yeah, the guy who got that big lottery bonus a few months ago -- shook his head and said the Ex isn't doing at all well. "[We sell] between two and five copies a day," he said; his busy store used to sell about 40 copies of the Hearst-owned Examiner a day.

Well, we guess everything depends on how you define "impressive gains"; Dog Bites, for one, was tired of caroming around the city getting unpleasantly damp cuffs, so we went home with the new British Vogue, got the blankie out of the closet, and made that deferred mug of hot chocolate.

This is definitely not the dot-com spring.