Burgin Record   

Peripatetic editor David Burgin loses—for the second time in his career—the top editorial job at the San Francisco Examiner.

David Burgin, who has worked at more newspapers than perhaps anyone else in the business, loses a job as editor of the San Francisco Examiner for the second time.

Burgin's 13-month return engagement ended in January, when, he says, owner and Publisher Florence Fang fired him without explanation. His first stint in the job, under William Randolph Hearst III, ended in January 1986 after eight months.

Burgin's is the latest high-level departure at the paper since Hearst sold it to the Fang family in 2000. Last fall, Florence Fang fired her son Ted, who, as publisher, had hired Burgin after firing his first editor, Martha Steffens (see above). Fang did not return repeated phone calls from AJR.

"My career has been one of fixing newspapers," says Burgin, 63. If you count the Examiner twice, he says, he's been top editor at 16 papers, among them the Oakland Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and the late Dallas Times Herald and Houston Post.

His most famous move at the Examiner was creating the "BASTARDS!" headline that ran over a picture of the burning World Trade Center towers on the front of the September 12 edition, which went into reprints that day and has continued to sell. Burgin also took a radical step early on. "I threw out the beat system, because I didn't want anybody on the staff to make any comparisons whatsoever...with the Chronicle," he says. "It was not met with great enthusiasm."

He says he believes in turning "good ideas" into news. "We were located at Sixth and Market, which is the nastiest corner in town," he says. In launching a series of stories crusading to clean it up, "I renamed it Sixth and Mayhem, and it became part of the lexicon of talk in town."

Those on the staff who disliked Burgin's approach or clashed with his famously mercurial--some would say hot-tempered, in-your-face--management style seem to have mostly departed, some by choice, others not. He remains popular among those he hired who are still on staff.

"The guy's probably the most intelligent man I've ever worked with in the newspaper business," says Assistant Managing Editor James Mohr.

Burgin's replacement, Executive Editor Zoran Basich, calls him a "legend" and a "terrific editor."

Reporter Adrienne Sanders says she found Burgin incredibly encouraging. "There's nobody like Dave Burgin."

It was a fun year, Burgin says. But he has had trouble letting go. "I still want to pick up that phone and say, 'Fix that fucking headline.' "