Talk:Clint Reilly

Death date

Owing to discrepancies between various sources, I have removed the specific death date of Reilly. Only the NYT source gives Saturday as that date; the rest say "over the weekend." I have contacted the Times and await a clarification. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 03:44, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

The Examiner originally announced simply that he died at the weekend (i.e., either 18th or 19th), and the Chronicle and others reported that. However, the family obituary added by Rusted AutoParts has the 18th, and that's a reliable source for the death date (and presumably the NYT's source). ... Iseult, I edit conflicted with you attempting to save my own initial expansion of the article. You've covered material that I had in hidden notes, and you've used different major sources. So I plan to attempt to combine the two versions, but I'm out of time now so saving my version off-wiki. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:48, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Yngvadottir, ah, unfortunate. I'll shove that back in. I dislike using Legacy, so let's see if I can find the source. As for the NYT, no, not the case; Legacy lists the family obit as being published from 7/24-26, and the NYT piece was published on the 23rd. Perhaps Trip Gabriel got a unnamed source, but that would be weird, as he credits Frank Holland with giving the cause of death. But I've restored the date and Legacy source and have submitted a request via the SFPL for an obit search; check back in four weeks.

As for expansions, I've been eager to take this to DYK for some time (see source access dates and my draft history). I'd be happy to take this to GA with you. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 14:20, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

@Iseult: I was hoping when I made my quick and dirty re-expansion from the redirect that someone(s) else would come along and use the now available sources—and what I'd found from earlier. So thank you very much! But my version is different in balance, even aside from the fact that you cover the accusations that I had in hidden notes for my intended Phase 2. (And thanks for the offer, but I don't do GA.) You've got me a bit over a barrel with the DYK nom, since if I make my planned edit, the article will change quite radically. I'll start a new section below, so that others reading this page don't miss it. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:55, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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• ... that one of Clint Reilly's clients called him "Satan"?

• Source: He is “Nixonian,” says one colleague. “Queeg-like,” says another. State Sen. Quentin Kopp, a former client, refers to him fondly as “Satan.”

• • Reviewed:
  • Comment: Please be on the lookout for close paraphrasing, as my brain is irretrievably contaminated by copyrighted material after having read nineteen sources and sixty pages. Also, let me know if you consider there to be BLP issues in the personal life section.

Converted from a redirect by Iseult (talk) and Yngvadottir (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.

In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 14:48, 28 July 2026 (UTC).

• Comment. Please hold off on reviewing this for a day; I had been working on the article with different sources and need time to merge in material. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:59, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Endorsing Yngvadottir’s request; not my intention to place them “over a barrel”. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 16:08, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

And rescinding the request; I've made my big edit and Iseult and I are not wrestling with each other over the article. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:29, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

Sourcing and balance

Iseult and I overlapped in working on this article, and wound up using a different balance of sources. I prioritized documenting his career, using the obituaries, earlier articles in the SF Chronicle, and the two extended sources that I found had been there in barelink. Some sources, including the SF magazine article, which I found at Wayback, mention the accusations that Iseult has included, but I had left those and his philanthropy—which I had intended to merge into Personal life, since he received recognition for it together with his wife—in hidden notes for me or others to fill out later. The two of us wound up using quite different sources; some of those that are now in the article, such as Mission Local's retrospective, I hadn't even looked at yet, just noted the URL. I'm concerned that there's a complex story here and while we don't want to write a hagiography, there's also a risk of making it too much of a hit piece. Since it's been nominated for DYK, there's a bit of urgency because the DYK reviewers are going to have to look at it all over again after I get finished merging in my material and rephrasing. But it will take me hours to do that, and I can't begin right now.

So I'm going to ask them to hit the brakes at DYK. And I'm going to make two edits in quick succession to the article itself, replacing the text with the version I had tried to save 8 or so hours ago, and then self-reverting. So that folks know what I'm talking about (and can eviscerate my text here if they so desire). Yngvadottir (talk) 15:55, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir, thanks for your work! We (you? I?) will merge the content over the next few weeks (or after it hits the main page?).

I don’t know that it’s too much of a hit piece; I think that, as the press thought it pressing enough to press him on during political campaigns, it bears mention. Maybe there’s a weight issue, which we ought to work out before the nom.

Then there’s the other set of allegations in Wallace’s long profile. I don’t know what to do with that and have defaulted to omission. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 16:13, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

I see you've kept most of the changes from my big edit merging the two versions. I think the DYK evaluation can go ahead now; for one thing, I'm no longer being credited for what was in fact 90% a pre-existing version that I restored from the redirect. (And parenthetically, I think that redirection is a good demonstration of how if you don't reference everything, and especially if you leave the refs as bare links, people tend to underestimate notability. There were 2 excellent refs in that draft, I found almost nothing that was actually not covered in one or both of them, but the case for GNG was overlooked because the article didn't use the refs right, perhaps in large part because it didn't identify them.) I have more references I can and should add; I have a subscription to the Chronicle and I suspect access to SF media (I can't see articles in that SF business rag, unfortunately; they even come up blank for me on Wayback) fills out the picture of his decades in real estate (and philanthropy). I (or someone else who can see more newspapers) need to expand the real estate accordingly; it was far from just the Mercantile Exchange. The consolidation of Bay Area news is also a big regional story, plus the obvious human interest aspect of his having bought the Examiner when he once sued it. After reviving the article, I searched for mentions to convert into incoming links, and the resulting pattern says something about the traces left by his publishing purchases, while the real estate has fewer incoming links because, understandably enough, Wikipedia has fewer articles on San Francisco buildings than Manhattan buildings.

I think I've got the publishing adequately covered, but I suspect someone with Newspapers.com access would find a trove of coverage on that and the real estate transactions, and on his political consulting too. (I searched for the Murky News article with the inflammatory question—presumably by some headline writer in 1999—about whether he was a "testosterone-crazed" bully. No soap, probably as well.) There is coverage in books of his campaign management; some of it is in works on SF politics / California Democratic politics, and at a fast glance some of it looked to be in passing, or crediting him for an apposite term for a strategy, but there may be an extended treatment or two of his use of voter roll analysis and targeted mailing. Note that I found a source that enabled me to link our article on narrowcasting. ... The foregoing, plus what I wound up doing in my edit (which wound up including putting in material on his philanthropic activities that I hadn't included in my edit-conflicting version), shows that although you have a more discursive style, Iseult, I wound up rebalancing the article in a different way than I'd thought I would, mainly by adding more elsewhere rather than by shrinking the sections on the accusations, although I redistributed some of the material, leaving only the drinking in Personal life. That included adding a couple of quotations about him rather than shortening or removing the quotes you had, as I'd originally thought I would. So even though I think there's more that should be added, I don't think the article as it is now is unbalanced toward either adulation or criticism, and I think it's complete enough to be evaluated for DYK. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:50, 29 July 2026 (UTC)

Yngvadottir (do you prefer pings?), thanks for your work and thought; I'll see what I can do about newspapers.com. I applied a few days ago for access through The Wikipedia Library, but things appear to be a little slow on that front. I also know that the LA Times, to which I have access, covered a lot of state politics back in the day, so there might be something buried deep within their archives, if tangential.

I think the easiest things to help the article are finding a proper source for the passage of SF's Prop M in 1986 (I ought to email the SF elections division, though a Chronicle source might do. I added a Chron source with circumstantial evidence of its passage), finding Eugene Boyle's election results so that we can quantify "a few hundred votes" as described in the sources (running that down via libraries, the state archives, and one Caltech professor emeritus; this is definitely going to lead me to write about 1970s redistricting), and personal initiatives as mentioned in your comment. I think this was touched on in Eskanazi, though I've read so much and the reference list is so dense now that I'm getting a bit lost. But maybe there are SF sources from back then.

I too was unsuccessful in finding the Mercury piece. Hopefully newspapers.com lets me in soon. In solidarity, Iseult ^Δx talk to me 02:58, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

(Yes, pings are best, thanks; I don't subscribe to discussions.) Oh good, I've found the LA Times useful in the past but now I find I can't even get past the demand to surrender all privacy rights, all clicking on that gets me is a "Subscribe!" box. (Eff you very much ...) Can you see this October 1992 article for example? There is indeed material on his personal initiatives in one of the long sources, likely SF Weekly, hence my note to myself and others.

As to documenting San Francisco Proposition M (1986), I'm not as sure as I was that it merits an article, but if you mean simply documenting that it passed, there's a fair bit in the local press; it's had a long tail: June 2018; July 2023, by John King, Chronicle urban environment reporter; December 2019; ... and this is a September 1999 Examiner editorial in the context of the mayoral race where Reilly ran. The best summary I've found is this 1999 article by a slow-growth proponent, linked by King. If you mean linking Reilly to its passage, apparently that's a gripe: opinion article bemoaning the obituaries not highlighting his work on Prop M. That's what I was looking for on Google Books, where I had surprisingly little success; for example Richard Edward DeLeon, Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991, 1992, has a lot on Feinstein opposing Prop M but mentions Reilly once, and not in that connection. (It appears to have broken alliances. Jack Davis, a former Reilly associate, ran the No on M campaign for Feinstein, and I plan to add at least one news story on how Reilly painted Willie Brown as pro-Manhattanization in 1999 as well as associating him with corruption.) Another book that may have something worth citing if one can see enough of the relevant pages: Karl Beitel, Transforming San Francisco: Community, Capital, and the Local State in the Era of Globalization, 1956–2001, 2003. And Google showed me tantalizing snippets of SF magazine from May 1987; sorry, I can no longer make trips into SF to look up things like that in the Main Library. Haven't looked for the Boyle election result, but I imagine either a book or a newspaper will have it. ... That's enough rabbiting on from me for now :-) Yngvadottir (talk) 06:02, 30 July 2026 (UTC)